Far be it from me to really take seriously the very public game of musical chairs which everyone is calling the “Left Tea Party Moment” over at ye olde Democratic Party, but I have to admit that many of the Tuesday nights over the past couple of months have induced an episode or more of a particularly delectable schadenfreude over the defenestration of various centrist politicians from the top ranks of the party.

The Democratic Party primaries that have been making waves all happen on Tuesday night and so it was with a familiar tinge that I watched with glee last night as yet another DSA member wiped the floor with an overfunded centrist on a quarter of the budget. Particularly poignant was last night’s usurpation given that it most likely appears that the future political career of one of the most odious of the centrists, Alexander Vindman, has been effectively terminated.

For those who may not recall, Vindman was one of those opportunistic #Resistance heroes who were predictably and rapidly catapulted into the national spotlight only because they were willing to say something bad about Trump. If it hasn’t already, the historical record will one day show that the first Trump impeachment was nothing more than a political gambit on the part of one capitalist party to destroy the chances of its rival capitalist party in the form of a laughable charge of supposed political backdealing on the part of that one party’s bete noire, the “villainous” Donald Trump. And because Vindman, who is a Ukrainian immigrant, was particularly poised to serve as a poster child of victimhood from the putative evils of one Vladmir Putin (another really bad guy according to liberals), once his turn came up during the impeachment process, he instantly joined the cadre of the “valiant ones,” that specious category of heroism which liberals go on about whenever they talk about the difference between good and evil at their cocktail parties at Cape Cod.

So when Vindman lost last night to a DSA candidate after throwing limitless anti-Trump money at his totally predictable gambit at political leadership in the US there was a noted perception of a kind of comeuppance for the political class who for the past ten years have believed that the public would simply go on indefinitely buying their anti-Trump snake oil. Last night, the public definitively said they’ve had enough of kindergarten politics.

Now, once again, don’t get me wrong, I am not a supporter of the DSA. I do not believe that the DSA is anything more than a new marketing apparatus for capitalist politics in the form of serving as a very politically potent “radicalism” organ for the Democratic Party. Because of how much Israel has soured in the minds of so many of the voting public and because of sheer fatigue with the mainstream of Democratic Party politics, it only made sense that the upper tiers of the party leadership would at some point find it politically feasible to allow a new political coalition to take hold within their ranks. Enter the DSA, with its Mangione-coded, Hamas-apologizing, welfare state-touting rhetoric, a particularly acidic brew of petty bourgeois, half-baked political gestures that in the wake of Trump 2.0 have nonetheless become too popular to ignore. Yet, it is nothing but more of the same repackaged as the new. After November, when the smoke clears and we will know who is actually headed to the Capitol in January, the next decade of Democratic Party politics will more or less be written in stone and the only difference in our lives will be that we will all have a slightly better version of Obamacare and we will be able to see a Palestinian flag that was permitted to be planted somewhere close to Constitution Gardens.

We will have socialism one day. But believe me it won’t look anything like what these so-called socialists say it looks like or want to do with the “socialism” of which they speak. Instead, what we are witnessing is a civil war happening within capitalist politics. And as with any civil war, one side will challenge the status quo. That status quo has been a particularly sclerotic, Cold War-era hand-me-down that it is high time we let go of. If there is a side that has finally become successful enough to be able to close the chapter on that philosophy of political posturing, then I am all for it, its obviously inadequate politics notwithstanding. The injection of a new conversation into the body politic is an inherently healthy measure and will create new conditions with which to understand the metastasization of capitalist politics. Watching the disease progress brings new information into the fold, information that one day will prove effective in beating the disease. The virus of DSA politics is a new one on the scene and it is destroying this old virus called mainstream Democratic Party politics. Watching all of the rightoids succumb to the very derangement syndrome they so rightly accused liberals of these past ten years, only now in the form of Mamdani Derangement Syndrome, has also been particularly instructive: even the once new kids on the block are not immune to the lack of imagination that characterizes mainstream politics. For a long time, Democratic Party politics has been like a TV show that jumped the shark several seasons ago and is now running on fumes. It’s a good thing there’s a change. Even if the new new kids on the block are just another bunch of bullshit artists.

I don’t think I’d be exaggerating if I said that the overwhelming majority of big time players in the fashion industry—your Wintours and your Guccis—are, at the end of the day, pretty despicable people. Not for nothing did the great lampoon of the industry, Zoolander, have one of its greatest successes in the outrageous character of Mugatu played by Will Ferrell. A cartoonish narcissist, Mugatu was portrayed more like an arch villain than the type of swank, saurian fashion designer with which we are more familiar. He was less Lagerfeld and more Dr. Evil. Yet, the joke landed and for a very good reason: no one should have any illusions about the degree of manipulation, exploitation and wanton disregard of some of our most central values in liberal democracy that pass for normal activity in this vaunted space full of pampered elites, attention whores and social climbers. Mugatu, though a total exaggeration, nonetheless registered with audiences on a primal and familiar level.

In certain respects the fashion industry resembles another industry in which a kind of modern day serfdom prevails and that is the porn industry. Both industries rely on a half-lumpenized reservoir of reserve labor in the form “barely legal” youths who happened to have won the genetic lottery. Both industries are controlled by a cabal of powerful players with money dispersed widely throughout the world, many times hidden in the accounts of faceless individuals with chateaus and villas and islands. Both industries are tied umbilically to the mainstream attention economy in ways that critically redound to their bottom lines, in the fashion industry, by the way that Hollywood and politics enjoin the masses for an appreciation of spectacle and, in the porn industry, by the way that the mass value of sexual freedom cultivates desires for immediate sexual gratification.

No one need be surprised about this. It’s written quite clearly in the labels that all say “Made in Vietnam.” If one of the fashion industry’s leading lights goes on a surreptitiously filmed antisemitic rant one night in a Paris cafe and then another one of its leading lights can’t wait more than two years before she brings this man, who for reasons of common decency went into hiding, back out into the spotlight, should anyone really clutch their pearls? The answer is no, of course, but an op-ed that came out today in The New York Times seems to think otherwise, and the reason, in my own opinion, is that most of what passes for moral striving in the pages of the “paper of record” is actually sanctimonious, woke-restoration slop mired in the exigencies of class warfare.

The piece’s author happens to be a biographer of John Galliano, he of the antisemitic rant, though it’s clear that with a biographer like her no one would need a smear campaign. Since I’m not an antisemite, I don’t defend Galliano’s views, nor do I defend Galliano himself. But don’t take it from me. The court of public opinion, well before anyone really had ever even heard the term “woke,” as with Michael Richards and his anti-black bit onstage, acted swiftly and decisively in the case of the drunken rant Galliano allowed to be filmed that night long ago. Yet, Galliano’s biographer is a muddled voice in the debate about the relationship between great art and the people who make great art and society’s role in adjudicating that relationship. For she believes that this court of public opinion rules like the Supreme Court of the United States in that its judgements become writ of the realm. It does not. She hasn’t come to grips yet with the fact that certain industries have their class warfare baked into the very commodities they produce, that “it’s the anti-egalitarianism, stupid,” that the raison d’être of these industries is situated in their insulation from the pronouncements of this court to begin with, that their mandate is the very repudiation of the court of public opinion itself.

The uncomfortable fact is that nothing short of the overcoming of the need for a fashion industry in the first place is required in order for their to be a moral reckoning that is not, like all industries in modern capitalism, hopelessly entangled in self-contradiction. You cannot ask dealers in the black market to stop trading with the Gottis. If they did, they would no longer have a business. Asking the great figures of the fashion industry to not be antisemitic is like asking Goebbels to discuss the theory of surplus value: even the briefest acknowledgment of the reality of political economy in industrial capitalism would require the wholesale abandonment of views that are central to the world view that props up their careers. This is what Adorno means when he says that the figure of the Jew in the global imaginary is the linchpin of reified economic activity in modern capitalism: you can not instantiate and maintain a realm of class warfare without eventually tiring of Marxian abstractions and landing on easier and more convenient targets. This is precisely what is meant when orthodox Marxists like myself say that there never would have been a National Socialism without an international proletarian socialist movement to begin with. As Anton Jager has said, “Fascism is the outcome of a civil war within labor relations in which the winner is the nativist variety.” This is why there is no real threat of fascism today in the Western world—no matter how many times liberals like Dana Thomas would have us believe otherwise—because neoliberalism has dissolved any meaningful labor movement and thus any potentiality for a civil war within labor relations, the critical ingredient of fascism.

So, what is the world view these despicable ones, our Wintours and Gallianos, would need to abandon if they were to be made aware of the self-contradiction of industrial capitalism? This isn’t the forum for me to go into a class analysis of the origins of the fashion industry. Not only do I lack the credentials for such an analysis but it would also require a book, not an article. Suffice it to say that my theory is that the fashion industry exists as a playground for elites to live out an affective lifestyle in which they may play the roles that the monarchy performed during feudal society. In order for these elites to be able, not just to meet their bottom lines, but also to justify their activities, they need to be able to create trickle down effects from the creations which they put on display; in other words, they need to eventually offer ready-to-wear varieties of the rarified objects installed on their runways. Without the masses buying into their ideals in the form of down-priced offerings of what they create up top, there is no fashion industry to speak of. The fashion industry is therefore a kind of relic from the pre-capitalist era when hierarchies and titles held economic power. One may say in the same breath that it doesn’t make sense to ask the monarchy to behave well. This is why all of the breathless coverage of Meghan Markle is so very obnoxious. No one should at all care that one of them is supposedly comporting themselves according to the self-invented moral injunctions of social democratic and progressive advances in civil society. They don’t give a shit about civil society and neither does Anna Wintour and John Galliano. If you really want to reform these people you might want to try not making cutesy movies about them starring Meryl Streep.

But that’s just the thing, we should distrust with our very lives the reforms which reformers like Dana Thomas are suggesting for the only reforms they really seek are reforms in managing capital, which is what social democracy and progressivism really are in the first place, forms of capitalism. We will never overcome the needs for self-contradiction in civil society until capitalism itself is overcome, the system which is in an inherent state of self-contradiction. Antisemitism lies at the heart of this state of self-contradiction. There were never any Jewish monarchs in feudal society and it shouldn’t surprise anyone that the fashion industry, its latter-day heir, should be so plagued by antisemitism. The presence of Jews in the industry, as in the cases of Calvin Klein and Marc Jacobs, does not inoculate it from this disease, any more than the presence of Jews in royal courts of the past inoculated their members from antisemitism. Labor relations in capitalism, so long as they remain in a state of self-contradiction, will always hold a gateway into a lingering antisemitism. Attempts at moral reform of the royal court are logically impossible. In order to have reform, we must overcome all courts, and this includes the so-called court of public opinion, for what moral guidance can a public under capitalism hope to achieve? This is a much grander project than the mere Swiffering of the grime on top of the floorboards which progressives focus on in their moral pandering. Until we overcome the self-contradiction of the project of bourgeois freedom brought about in the Enlightenment, we should at least enjoy (if that is even the correct term) the objects of even the vile ones who hold court. Let the Met and Galliano have their day. Do you really think that the Met is beyond reproach? It’s one of the worst of the worst. Wake up!

If you still haven’t gone out to see The Odyssey, well . . . are you by any chance a hermit? I ask because apparently this movie has become as impossible to avoid as death and taxes. I saw it and, despite a recent spate of contrarian criticism, I found it to be a wonderful piece of middlebrow entertainment with a (mostly) coherent message that fits snugly into the sentiments of our era without being too preachy about it. Compared to other summertime blockbusters, this makes Nolan’s Odyssey something of an art film. Which it kind of is. After all, that’s Nolan’s whole schtick to begin with, the seamless interweaving of the ligature of artistic cinema into the vessel of raw entertainment. In The Odyssey, he performs his schtick with grace and intelligence.

Earlier this year, however, when I first saw the trailer, I was predictably nonplussed: another summertime blockbuster sporting big action and insipid plots vying for my attention and dollars, no thank you. I say “predictably” because I am generally a rather fatigued individual when it comes to marketing, hype and other elements of the vast portion of the attention economy traditionally known as the culture industry. Nolan being a bigtime Hollywood director is part and parcel of the giant, sedulous machine that continually vies for, and often wins, our attention.

After several months away from any engagement with Mr. Nolan and his new enterprise—along with some yearning for more reading time as I would glance at the spine of my Fagles translation of the Homeric epic on my bookshelf—I was ripe for the suits in Hollywood to reel in another fish in the form of me. The glowing reviews came in and, being a more than tepid appreciator of Nolan’s corpus, I decided to drop my skepticism and take a plunge into the Bronze Age Mediterranean for three hours.

And I do not regret it.

I won’t go on any more than I already have about this or that about the film as I’m sure you’ve either a) already seen it or b) aren’t in any position to bear hearing one more accolade. Chances are that, when it comes to whether or not you should see it, you either don’t need any convincing or you’re dead set against it. So, whether or not you’re part of the a) or the b) category, I simply want to share with you a particularly Gen X sentiment that I think is getting lost in the unending hoopla.

A good deal of that noise has to do with one Emily Wilson, her modern translation of The Odyssey and her review of the film itself in The London Review of Books. Suffice it to say it was not part of the cadre of incandescent criticism Nolan’s latest has been receiving. She threw tomatoes, not flowers. This is striking given that Nolan used her translation to devise the screenplay and the success of the film has subsequently catapulted the British classicist to ancillary fame. I can imagine Nolan, perplexed about all the latter-day opposition to his treatment of the epic, feeling the shaft of the blade from his very own muse: “Et tu, Brute?”

Wilson’s translation is part of that breed of reexamination of the classics that seeks to blow dust off the tome. Her translation—which, full disclosure, I’ve only sampled—translates Homer’s verse into a colloquial patter that is direct, unadorned and elemental. I am not a supporter of this type of scholarship. Personally, I chafe when a prince from an ancient society calls his queenly mother, “Mom.” I see the point of this kind of reimagining of the affect and syntax of ancient dialogue and ancient narration, but I think it destroys more than it helps. Antiquity is too strange to our modern sentimentalities to sustain such familiarization. It feels like an imposition and a kind of scholastic graffiti. We learn from the classics because of our shared humanity across a cultural and historical chasm. Remove that chasm and the import of the lesson vanishes.

Emily Wilson’s review of the movie was as controversial as her translation. And it has spawned a micro-genre of reviews of her review which, technically, this very Substack article you are currently reading is an example of (along with being yet another stone placed on the gigantic cairn of summertime Odyssey mania—yes, I know, and I am sorry). Wilson’s line of attack borrowed from another review that preceded hers which the magazine Jacobin published a mere week or so prior: that review, written by the notorious Nolan hater Eileen Jones, made a lot of hay about the moroseness of this interpretation of the Odyssey and how it manipulates the true nature of the poem’s hero and era beyond recognition. Wilson’s subsequent takedown elaborates on this idea, claiming that it obliterates the real value of the Odyssey tale as a whole. Rich words coming from someone whose translation of The Odyssey almost reads like a young adult novel!

Ok, let’s face it: Matt Damon’s performance as the titular hero of the movie is about as moving as egg yolk coagulation at the bottom of this morning’s breakfast dish. He might have gotten carried away with Nolan’s note about “less is more.” Throughout the entire movie he seems to need an up-dose of his Zoloft prescription. It is jarring, tragic and, at certain points, unintentionally comical, to have been given the feast of this new film, with all of its kinetic thrills and fascinating mysteries, only to be guided through the whole affair by a man who sounds like he’s attending his first AA meeting.

Yet, we never went to a Nolan film for the laughs, nor for the dialogue, for that matter, and The Odyssey, with its wooden, declamatory lines, is no exception. You actually have to give it to a genius like Nolan that he so willfully dispenses with even trying to do anything about the hyper-severity of his films and the artificiality of the words he puts into his characters’ mouths. He has his eyes set on another prize and, as far as I am concerned, he wins it.

You see, Nolan is a fellow Gen X-er, and one of the many things that most people don’t understand about the Gen X mentality is its disaffection, cynicism and fatigue. While we were kids we were watching cheesy, ridiculous and incompetent syndicated programs from the 60s and the 70s. All you would have had to do was turn on the tube after you got back from school every day and, within a year, you would have seen the entire series of the original Batman TV show. You know, the one that invented the lexicon of “BAM!” and “KAPOW!” At the same time, there was a whole industry shelling out inventions of brand new genres at scale. The buddy crime-comedy, the sci-fi and fantasy flick, the action-adventure blockbuster. But many of these were rated R, which, back in ‘85, was sometimes a problem if you hadn’t convinced your parent to accompany you to the theater. The experience was unnerving: at home on the television, culture appeared like one big joke while on the screen it was oracular. TV audiences today can never know the curious thrill of seeing beloved characters from a TV series that was broadcast in a 4:3 aspect ratio suddenly vivified on a gigantic screen in 16:9. The effect is of being brought into deeper realms of their psyches than had previously been possible. That was the divide between TV and film, a divide which today has been collapsed as streaming cinematizes TV and makes film itself secondary.

We Gen X-ers recognize what Nolan is doing in ways that Boomers and Millennials, who were not exposed to the cognitive dissonance of being children during the 80s, simply cannot. The obsession with seriousness which Nolan grants his heroes, from his Batman to his Odysseus, is an effort to accomplish a task whose mandate was first clarified back when he was a child and having to contend with the insufficiency and kitschiness of the culture industry, even as its newer offerings hinted at unexplored potential. People forget that the die had already been cast by the time Nolan’s Batman Begins changed the playbook for superhero extrapolation: it may seem unbelievable now, but when Tim Burton came out with his Michael Keaton Batman in 1989, word on the street was that Batman had been turned into a serious man. I remember once driving on a boulevard somewhere in Trenton, New Jersey and there was a guy who had somehow souped up his Cadillac to look like the chintzy original Batmobile and was costumed in the innovative Burton Batman suit driving past me, expressionless. At that moment, I knew he was one of us, a man caught between two pop cultural sensibilities. He probably could not afford to make his vehicle look like Burton’s Batmobile but he’d found a way to invest in the suit and that disconnect between two distinct versions of a well-known intellectual property sums up the Gen X experience growing up. It was an indecisive time between pop-cultural hegemonies.

The recent adaptations of the Dune series, along with a slew of other intellectual properties, illustrate this notion even more. There is an attempt on the part of Gen X auteurs to compensate for a lost childhood during which so much potential for deep and dark psychological complexity was simply lost to the jejune antics of Boomer suits signing off on deals while drinking too many martinis during lunch. We wanted something serious because we knew that something serious lurked inside of these properties. And now, thirty to forty years later, we have the efflorescence of that yearning for depth: a spate of sci-fi/fantasy/action-adventure flicks motioning towards Shakespeare. Just compare the way the villain in Villeneuve’s Dune movies, Baron Harkonnen, is portrayed between David Lynch’s (boomer) rendition of a buffoonish psychopath with an acne problem and Villeneuve’s (Gen X) version of a cold, Godfather-like stoic. Having read the Dune books I can tell you that Lynch’s is closer to Frank Herbert’s original creation. But that’s not really the point, is it?

And that is the real problem with Emily Wilson’s review of Nolan’s The Odyssey. Setting aside the fact that she is a classicist and not a film critic—and this is obvious reading her review of the movie—Wilson commits an error which you don’t need to be a film critic to avoid making: she forgets that cinema is by nature an interpretive genre. Perhaps she is too close to the source material, having lovingly translated the epic only ten years ago. But her bemoaning of the creation of a film version of The Odyssey so bereft of wonder and gods and magic and one so cast in gray misses the very point of a movie taking an original text as its source material in the first place. When people say that “the book was better than the movie” they are also committing this error, as though the two consumptions of media, involving the committal of disparate faculties, can in any way be compared by the same metric. Since when was a movie supposed to be so loyal? People get caught up in the inherent vivification that accompanies sitting through a film, with its real humans using their voices and moving around right in front of your eyes. But just because a film director has interceded on the powers of imagination which occur when one is reading, by animating the drama with real live sets, doesn’t mean that this expectation of fealty to the original text is warranted. There is a host of other mitigating factors that go into the making of a film, from the politics of synchronous, mass release to the gigantic budgets to the injunction to entertain, that vitiate against the expectation that a film must express the status quo of any given audience’s understanding of an intellectual property. Somehow, Wilson, in her review, forgot about this essential fact about filmmaking in general and that is unfortunate.

I will close by saying that I think it is high time we Gen X-ers realize that the era of Shakespeare-ization of the blockbuster needs to come to a close. Nolan’s version of The Odyssey is a forward-moving, thrilling and extremely serious version of the ancient tale of a hero on his way home through troubled waters. The original Homeric text is to Nolan’s version of the epic poem what Lynch’s Harkonnen is to Villeneuve’s, a much more colorful and dynamic story that does not so neatly express one big idea. Nolan should be praised for his powers of distillation. But we have now savored that particular brew many, many times. We are now at peak Nolan fever and at peak self-seriousness. It’s been a great run of turning familiar intellectual properties into dark journeys into the shadow side of the soul. How about we now start expanding our horizons and rediscover some of that good ol’ naivete? Last night, I watched Written on the Wind, a mid-fifties Sirk melodrama full of insane, campy, over-the-top antics that somehow speak volumes about our naked appetites and propensity towards decadence and it was amazing. More of that please.

The fact that The New York Times considered it appropriate to construct the lede for Lindsay Graham’s obituary around his shifting opinion of Donald Trump illustrates more than just the obviously pronounced case of TDS the “paper of record” suffers from: it points as well to an electoral strategy on the part of one of the two capitalist parties that demonstrates a complete abdication of true democratic representation.

For those of my readers who themselves suffer from this pernicious syndrome, allow me to spell something out for you: Donald Trump is indeed “bad,” at least in the sense that his policies suck, but—and I really need you to listen to this next part—he is not Satan incarnate. If he were Satan Incarnate, then, yes, it would make sense for the most widely read and regarded daily periodical in the country to abandon its journalistic standards in order to render the death of a famous senator from South Carolina as having relevance to only one thing and one thing only and that would be what his relationship with Donald Trump was. Because in that case, we the public would need to be warned about the activities of Satan Incarnate and the shifting sands of a senator’s opinion on Satan Incarnate would be the most relevant part of the story of his life.

After all, if Satan Incarnate walks among us, then all bets are off and every single story that comes to us must be scrutinized for its impact on the cause of destroying this Satan. In this case, we need to know or, rather, to be reminded how Lindsay Graham’s opinion of Donald Trump changed over time. In this case, it wouldn’t be a matter of the usual shit-talking that politicians do when they run for office against each other, only to spit in their palms and shake hands with each other before riding off into the sunset together as BFFs, a pattern that is as well-worn as the soles of an Appalachian Trail backpacker. No, it wouldn’t be a case of the usual politicking behaviors, for in this case we are talking about Satan Incarnate and therefore all bets are off. Everything else, healthcare, the economy, climate, is relevant only insofar as it pertains to the cause of destroying Satan or it is merely a secondary issue to be put on the backburner for when the blessed day arrives that our faithful moral crusaders who know everything that is true and good have successfully rid this planet of the scourge of Satan Incarnate.

But, as anyone who is in reality knows, Donald Trump is, in fact, not Satan Incarnate but, rather, an unusually noxious though nonetheless historically transformative President of the United States, someone with the personalized branding of an Andrew Jackson or Theodore Roosevelt and who will leave the office indelibly altered on the order of FDR. Of course, I am only stating facts, not opining on those facts. This article is not about my opinion on the man’s presidency or his policies, but rather the need to remind readers what the facts are. Fact: he is not Satan Incarnate. Fact: he has transformed politics in the United States.

And since Donald Trump is not Satan Incarnate, but just another POTUS, though a historically transformative one, it does not make sense for a periodical such as The New York Times to fashion the lede for an obituary of a famous senator around what amounts to a completely mundane aspect of that senator’s campaign strategy. I grant you, in terms of the daily life of the average American, such behavior should rightly seem extraordinary: most sane people can not imagine saying on Tuesday the things that Lindsay Graham said about Donald Trump—and what every primary campaign opponent says about each other—and then on the bright morning of Wednesday going in front of cameras after your campaign has concluded and your opponent’s polling numbers have come in to praise the man as a great American patriot. None of us really can imagine doing this sort of thing because we are not psychopaths which is why we don’t seek office.

However, it should be well understood by this point that this sort of venal, psychopathic behavior is par for the course amongst politicians of every stripe and color, that there really is no way to actually be a politician in a capitalist society unless you lie, cheat and steal. Therefore, when one of those politicians dies, it would only be natural for us to expect not to be reminded of the obvious in the tagline of that senator’s obituary and instead be given a more grounded appraisal of his life.

But that is not what we received, which, for the aforementioned reasons, can only mean that The New York Times has a very bad case of TDS.

Worse than that, it is spreading the disease. And for a very specific purpose.

The midterms are in November. Also, in this day and age of constant political turmoil and political sensationalism, of change elections happening every single term, the coming presidential election in 2028 might as well be happening today, as everything that Democrats are thinking about are those two elections. Being the chief propaganda organ of the Democratic Party, The New York Times is therefore tasked with, not only shoring up the votes, but also tailoring the narratives.

Notice that the name “Graham Platner” was barely ever mentioned in its pages until the ghost of #MeToo, a favorite political plank of the newspaper’s, came back for a reboot. Notice the tepid manner in which it reports on Mamdani’s mayoralty, on the upsurge of populism within the ranks of the party. Again, I am not writing this article in order to support the DSA or these new candidates or even Mamdani. As far as I am concerned, it’s all still just capitalist politics. But it is a fact that these candidates are shifting the political winds and if it’s one thing that alarms The New York Times it is a challenge to the establishment. Like any properly honed institutional apparatus in a capitalist society, the paper is highly adaptable to changing tides: it must bend like a reed in the wind in order to stay rooted in the stable soil of the security state it upholds. If there happens to be a notable uptick in populist sentiment among the Democrats it must therefore report on it in a precisely calibrated fashion, not too contemptuous, not too fawning, and definitely not too critical. When possible, simply ignore. When not possible to ignore, be cagey. The Platner case speaks volumes in this regard.

What concerns The New York Times above everything else is maintaining a particular understanding of the social order that is allied with the technocratic administrative state that has held sway perhaps going all the way back to Woodrow Wilson. This is its chief remit, to uphold the prerogatives of a social democratic, security state-first policy constellation, for it is this political order that has ruled for over a century. I find most of what he says out loud to be utterly laughable but the one thing that Curtis Yarvin gets right is this thing he calls The Cathedral, the panoply of the fourth branch of government comprised of an army of unelected professionals whose main task is to uphold the bureaucratic, shall we say, “Deep State” that has worked from off to the side of completely visible politics ever since World War I. And The New York Times is that state’s most sanguine pamphleteer.

The Presidency of Donald Trump of course represents the greatest threat to this political order this country has ever seen. Once again, I will just say, this article is not opining on whether that is a good thing or a bad thing. Maybe I’ll write that one at a later date. But this article concerns itself with the facts and it is a fact that Donald Trump represents a distinct threat to the security state apparatus that has held sway since Wilson. It is this that the average, unthinking Democrat means when they say that he represents a “threat to democracy.”

Considering what the stakes are, it only makes sense that The New York Times would consider Trump to be Satan Incarnate. And, if that is the case, which, in a manner of speaking it is—if you consider the security state apparatus to be the most precious thing in the body politic, not the country, not your fellow Americans, not the economy, but, rather, this Kafkaesque social undemocratic political order governed by an army of unelected bureaucrats—if that is the most precious thing, then, yes, I grant you, Trump is Satan Incarnate.

Ok, then. From this perspective there can be nothing more important than making sure that as many Democrats get elected as possible. If some of them have annoying ideas about healthcare and Israel and the police then so be it, but the point is to get them all in office so they can then be governed by this fourth branch of government. The best way to do that is to remind everyone not about their dwindling finances but rather of Satan Incarnate and how he apparently represents all that is unholy in this universe. Forget about the house you wanted. Forget about paying off your debt. Forget about ever being able to achieve the god given right of freedom which being an American is intended to grant you. Forget about all of that because right now the only important thing is to destroy Satan Incarnate. Don’t forget what that traitor Lindsay Graham did. Yeah, that’s right, we don’t care that he just died. That’s what you get when you join forces with Satan Incarnate. See you at the ballot box.

The patent glee with which the New York Times is reporting on the demise of the Platner campaign has more to do with the class prerogatives that form its putative political goals than its more forthrightly stated emphasis on social justice values around gender equality. It was always thus. With or without the allegations, with or without the Nazi tattoo, with or without the Reddit posts, Graham Platner was always an ill-fit for the party’s image of a diversity-first political organization. This adds to the celebration: not only can the party now protect its brand, it has also disciplined its would-be revolutionaries. We should make no mistake in assessing the wholesomeness of this party along with its principal media outlet: these organizations are more than capable of turning a blind eye to the most heinous crimes, the most severe accusations—when it is politically useful for them. Nor should we forget that it is not particularly complicated for these organizations to collaborate with the opposing party when the needs of the moment for control of the duopoly’s future are so urgent: it would not beggar belief to learn that the Collins campaign provided intel to or funding of the effort to unseat Platner. Therefore, irrespective of the veracity of the latest claims, the decisive ones that have terminated the Senate campaign of a phenomenal progressive upstart in Maine, it behooves us to remember that the larger organizational forces in play, the ones whose chief responsibility is the maintenance of this country’s class structure, exert enough pressure on the proceedings as to justify an interrogation of what might be the larger significance of this spectacular unraveling.

That significance has a lot to do with the usual conflation between morals and politics that characterizes bourgeois right. Cleaving the inherent unity of politics and morality into two, bourgeois society instantiates nifty categories that help individuals navigate thorny questions without addressing structural causes. It becomes an easy thing to dismiss a compromised Senate candidate with incredible political potential for the future of the country on the grounds that one’s moral conscience, a psychic formation that itself is governed by societal dynamics, demands an uncomplicated stance. Few of our country’s citizens are prepared to reside in the liminal space that interrogates what is occurring: the conscience that has been cultivated by bourgeois right all these years demands a fast, decisive response. The politics are then sacrificed at the altar of morality. Yet, such a sacrifice is an illusion: there never were two agents, one political, the other moral, between which such a sacrifice could occur. Politics and morality are one and their division is part of the crisis known as capitalism of which the Platner implosion serves as only the most recent illustration.

This isn’t a question of whether one should appeal for a continuation of the Platner campaign, irrespective of the allegations, or express satisfaction in what has actually occurred, its implosion. For neither presents us with a solution. The appeal to defy the demands of morality and to forge ahead with the politics of the situation is itself contaminated: the Platner campaign, being one prosecuted under the banner of a capitalist party, was always in a state of contradiction, as are all of the recent DSA upstarts. What is being presented to our eyes and ears as a groundswell of people power is actually a negotiation between entrenched power and new power. The DSA upsurge has been, is and always will be a mere act of diplomacy with the Democratic Party. It is a response to the technological and macro-economic dynamics of the incipient century which can not but require new ways of presenting politics to the masses. As these new dynamics take hold the structures must adapt. The DSA is just the creaking you hear from the wood settling into the cabin. But the cabin itself is part of something much larger which the DSA will never have any say about. Given this reality, how could it be that the Platner campaign could have ever been thought of as transformative? How can any of the DSA candidates ever be considered transformative?

Neither is the sense of completion from the swift defenestration of the rapist from the political scene an adequate response. The spectacle the public has witnessed has not yet matured to the level beyond hearsay. The public image of a man does not vitiate against his right to expect due process. It is true that the “judge, jury and executioner” in this case has only affected a man’s Senate campaign and not his life. Yet, this makes the same conflation between morality and politics that is the issue to begin with: there is no such thing as the man named Graham Platner when it comes to the Maine Senate campaign, there is only the phenomenon named Graham Platner. This happens as a result of the strong mediatic distortions that perforce impress upon our relations with any public figure in our psycho-libidinal attention economy. Feeling as though justice has been served to Graham Platner is akin to taking pleasure in witnessing the death of an otherwise beloved character on a TV show because you saw the actor who played him murder someone in cold blood in actual reality. These are two dimensions that are forever insulated from each other.

This means that there can be no real justice, nor can there be real political change within the bounds of a system that is in a state of inherent contradiction. The demise of the Platner campaign further elucidates this impasse. In this system, we can not actually carry out justice upon the figures who transgress, because the moral imperatives that govern that justice are hopelessly contaminated with politics. Additionally, in this system, we can not actually have political change, because the forces that resist it are hopelessly contaminated with morality. Platner the man will perhaps face actual justice in the court of law should actual charges be filed. Yet, that we have “cleaned house” by preventing a rapist from becoming Senator is a notion that falls apart the moment we consider that the entire realm of capitalist politics is suffused with potential charges that can not and never will be filed. Nor is it really possible to push for a continuation since we already know that the spectacle of political change has been contrived by the political forces that will ultimately dominate: in this way the allegations and their fatal impact were imbricated in the very first buds of the Platner campaign. His implosion is the bathos of a trite pantomime we all call our politics. We are continually reminded of how transparent and flimsy are these theatrical displays of political change. By now we would do well to remember that there is no hope if there is a donkey next to a political candidate.

The average American engages with political ideas in ways that run counter to the point of politics in a free society. Rather than as an exercise in testing one’s perspectives and judgements against the perspectives and judgements of their fellow American, they instead see this type of engagement as something more cynical, as an opportunity to clarify whether or not their fellow American is a political ally. The ideas themselves—their merits, their values, their qualities—remain unexamined; their content becomes instead an in-group signifier.

This is not the civic exercise the Founding Fathers intended. During the Revolutionary Era, they composed a set of documents that instantiated political subjectivity based around the exercise of free debate in the public square of society. The Declaration of Independence, for example, is just such an act of creation, an ontologization of free humanity. In it is implied that the disparate minds of one’s fellow Americans are as important as one’s own mind. This is an Enlightenment principle, specifically a Kantian one with which the Fathers would have been intimately familiar. In this way the American Revolution issues from the burgeoning freedom coming out of the Late Middle Ages, towards the expectation that a free citizenry shall engage with each other about the great questions of the day. Yet, such engagement can never be free unless the subjects themselves respect each other’s minds.

If the general tenor of the average conversation about politics is anything to go by, it seems that today we have less of a civic debate and more of a kind of roleplaying. To enter into political discourse these days is to agree to enter a preconceived world, much like the agreement one makes when reading a novel or playing Dungeons & Dragons: “past this line these are the relationships.” “This one is against that one.” “You are for this.” “They are for that.” “The ones that are for that are bad.” “You, instead, are good.” And so on.

This is not politics. This is gamesmanship. Gone is the respect for other minds implied in this country’s founding. It is only possible to be friends with one’s poker mate if after the cutthroat competitiveness and selfishness of seeking to win, there is subsequently a series of handshakes, drinking and other forms of reparative connection. Not only would friendships cease if these activities were not fostered, but the willingness to engage in the game of poker would itself dissipate. Both forms of connection, one the competitive, the other the egalitarian, would suffer. This is the difference between mere gamesmanship, which objectifies and reifies the other as some coordinate on the map instantiated by the rules of the game, and fraternity, which always respects the other as a separate and sacred mind entitled to the birthright of freedom enshrined in the Declaration.

This doesn’t mean that there should be no political parties, that there should never be disagreement, that we shouldn’t condemn opinions and ideas we consider abhorrent. But it does mean that we shouldn’t mistake for an absence of democracy the actual exercise of democracy itself, which was never intended to be merely voting, but also the selling of one’s labor in a free market, in other words, the right to be, to say and to think whatever the hell you damn want, so long as doing so does not infringe on one’s fellow American’s selfsame right.

The average American today makes a grave error every day: they perceive the “other side’s” difference of belief as evidence that their own ability to participate in the democratic project has been truncated. This is almost never true, and yet, the majority of Americans have been conditioned to believe that another’s differing belief is an actual infringement on their right to “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

The capitalist media play a massive, perhaps total, role in this state of cynicism amongst the public. Aligned with a decrepit system of education that paves the way for high levels of objectification in adult life, the media, through its capitalist propaganda and its gamesmanship, foreclose the possibility that the democratic subject shall find a way to exercise the rights which the Fathers laid out for him or her. This is a necessary outcome in a society with an incomplete revolution such as ours. As Lenin decreed, the only freedom of the press is “liberation of the press from capitalist oppression,“ which cannot happen so long as capitalists own the means of production, ie - the newspapers and printing presses (nowadays the “cloud capital” of Amazon and so forth). The media thereby inculcate the public with a very useful mechanism for domination: they propagate and coordinate one of the greatest cons the world has ever known, namely, the Manichaean falsity that there are “good Americans” and there are “bad Americans.” There are many things in Obama’s legacy that leave a lot to be desired, but that speech of unity in which he declared the existence of only “one America” is definitely not one of them. And yet, if you listen to the media too credulously, you will be led to believe, little by little, over the years, that he was wrong, that there are, in fact, two Americas, a good one and a bad one.

It is fitting that a recent, and highly contentious, Supreme Court decision, Trump v. Barbara, in which the majority ruled in favor of birthright citizenship, should uphold the 14th Amendment, one of the post-Civil War amendments. It is fitting because it arrives almost coinciding with the 250th birthday of America. The American Civil War was indeed a resumption of hostilities of the American Revolution (a revolution that, by the way, we are still fighting and must continue to fight until it is resolved). The Civil War was itself another birthday of America’s in which it attained one of the nation’s many rebirths, one of the many events along the ongoing revolution. In Alcoholics Anonymous, members of the fellowship often refer to their Day One of sobriety as their “birthday.” The Civil War was that “Day One” of a previously drunk America that needed to sober up and attain higher consciousness.

The issue of birthright citizenship is grossly misunderstood by conservatives. America is an idea or it is nothing at all. America lives and dies on the edge of what it created, which was the first truly free society the Earth had ever seen. Such a free society can not be wedded to anything other than an idea. America is necessarily an abstraction. Therefore, the only concrete manner with which to demarcate who is an American and who is not, since neither race, nor ethnicity, nor religion, may adjudicate the matter, is by the definition of the place called America. We should not prohibit foreigners from ever becoming American, so long as they agree to come here in the first place. But we should also recognize that anyone born on American soil is ipso facto an American.

This is somewhat personal for me. It is the mere happenstance of my having been born in a hospital in Queens that makes me an American, even as my parents, having been born outside of America, were not. If that is insufficient, if there must be some sort of lineage which I must produce to some authority or if I, though born within the city walls of this “Shining City on a Hill,” must take similar recourse towards citizenship that my own immigrant parents would need to, then America is an Old World nation. Yet, America is a New World nation.

The amendment which the Court upheld issued from the devastation and rebirth of the American Civil War, which was itself the ending of the ceasefire that had been going on for “four score and seven years” since the Siege of Yorktown had been called off. The Civil War elevated the consciousness of the already elevated consciousness enshrined in the Declaration.

Our Revolution is still incomplete. This means that we are due for another elevation of consciousness, another rebirth. And, like the previous rebirths, it will almost certainly be bloody.

But unlike the Intolerable Acts and unlike the Emancipation Proclamation, both of which were events that objectified hostilities between fellow Americans, the former against Loyalists and the latter against Confederates, today’s era does not have a single, existential matter that so clearly divides the public such that the taking up of arms is imminently called for. We are not at that point of rebirth yet. And we may not be again for quite some time. The Pax Americana shall endure for a while.

Until that fateful moment arrives when we must once again take up arms to rebirth ourselves as Americans, we who are citizens of America are all of us Americans. If that is to mean what it was intended to mean when the Founding Fathers created this greatest of all ideas out of whole cloth, then it behooves us to be more cynical toward, and less credulous of, what our favorite news outlets tell us about our fellow Americans. They’re lying.

What’s interesting about the Graham Platner campaign, the Democratic primary in Maine which is preparing for its eventual face-off in the November midterm election with longtime Republican Senator Susan Collins, is how it illustrates the incommensurability of partisan party affect. In other words, all of the accusations that have buzzed around this former Marine and oyster farmer (who is set to clinch the primary this evening), accusations which run the gamut from “Nazi” to “misogynist” to, now with a towel selfie having been leaked, “pedophile,” seem poised to compromise the energy of his campaign in ways it would be hard to imagine having similar impact were he a Republican. Because the GOP does not set out to paint itself as a standard-bearer of social justice, in order for any of its candidates to experience serious consequences for their campaigns, they would need to face truly heinous, and much more credible, accusations than those dogging the Platner campaign, which, though it’s most assuredly populist, nonetheless runs on the Democratic party line. If any one of the buzzwords all of the oppo research against Platner could stick, contra a fictional Republican version of him, it would spell doom for the campaign, and in a decidedly material way that would barely leave a dent were he on the GOP ticket.

“Dark woke,” the supposed street-fighting version of wokeism that dispenses with niceties for the purpose of political gain against its irreconcilable “fascist” adversary, has always been an awkward fit for a party that prides itself on its decorum. Because the Democratic Party is in some important ways a kind of sacerdotal firm populated by bourgeois mandarins, a gnostic retreat in political party form, one which demands quiet, rote obeisance to its mysterious prerogatives for all who enter, undertaking the kind of chaotic and militant affect which Platner represents comes with risks that simply don’t apply to the other side. “He’s our problematic politician, nyah nyah,” is certainly an attractive slogan for tired liberals who no longer wish to be constrained by the rulebook they feel has cost them dearly over the last decade, but it reads very much like an Ivy League nerd trying to look comfortable in Carharrt gear: it’s easy to see right through to the dork underneath the jock performance. Anyone remember John Kerry in hunting gear in 2004?

Conversely, this is also why the loud braying about hypocrisy and discrimination coming from the right (mostly in the UK) about the murder of 18-year-old Henry Nowak plays as awkwardly for them as does Graham Platner’s chud affect does for the left. Nowak, an innocent white British man of Polish ancestry who was stabbed four times by Vickrum Digwa, a British Sikh man, while on his way back to his dormitory and who was handcuffed by Southhampton police while he lay dying on the floor of a residential driveway, has become a flashpoint for the nativist right in the UK: their claim is that the UK police have become so propagandized by social democratic directives employed by the state, directives that are at this point basically embedded in their psyches, that they could not see that Nowak needed immediate medical attention and instead suspected the veracity of Nowak’s claims about not being able to breathe. Sound familiar?

Something to note about the social democratic state of the United Kingdom is its absence of the kind of robust free speech protections we Yankees assume as our birthright. Not for nothing was 1984 authored by a Brit. Indeed, in the UK, you literally can be arrested for saying the wrong thing. Just ask Graham Linehan, a popular British comedian who was handcuffed at Heathrow because of a couple of transphobic X posts. The great thing about our Bill of Rights is that, no matter what your politics are, you (theoretically) need not worry about flying in to JFK or LAX and getting arrested for some stupid thing you said. Unlike in Britain, where—as is also the case in much of Europe—the welfare state has supreme power to giveth and taketh away, our more libertarian-oriented understanding of civic life tries to keep the state agnostic about our cultural politics. This comes in handy when you want to organize, say, a movement for whichever political cause speaks to your heart: we don’t have healthcare, sure, but we get to scream into megaphones all we want.

The extent of the welfare state’s presence in civic life and in civic institutions therefore presents a particularly knotty problem for social democrats in the UK, which is currently experiencing a populist upsurge and which the Nowak murder has understandably enflamed. Nativist blowhards like Tommy Robinson and opportunistic populists like Reform leader Nigel Farage have latched on to the killing like a grizzly scooping honey out of an open jar. The ever trenchant Aris Roussinos has written about how this murder essentially ushers Reform into UK political dominance. And although Robinson is getting dogged by accusations of hypocrisy stemming from video resurfacing of him saying that Sikhs are “the good kind” of immigrant, this has not stopped him from nonetheless taking to the streets in his usual muckraking manner, crying foul about how lax immigration and the welfare state are corroding civic trust in the UK.

People like Robinson and Farage, though they be odious, are nonetheless correct in raising alarm bells about the crisis which the Nowak murder represents. Ralph Leonard, writing today in Compact Magazine, succinctly breaks down the absurdity of an overweening antiracist bureaucratic order:

Bureaucratic anti-racism has led to a new multi-tiered policing regime which treats people differently by race, supposedly for the sake of “racial equity,” which as the police’s own statement on the subject explains, “does not mean treating everyone ‘the same’ or being ‘colour blind.’” Equality no longer means the right to be treated according to the same standard, but the right to be treated differently in order to engineer an equal outcome.

You don’t have to be on the right to understand that this is not the way to run what Leonard calls later on in the piece a “civilized legal system.“ The presence of incoherent and unjust directives within policy structure, such as in the above, stems from legitimate outrages over systemic racism and inequality. But, annoying and crude as many of them are, agitators on the right intuitively sense, much more than their counterparts on the left, that the social democratic solution to this problem does not work.

Unfortunately for rightists, of both the UK and the US variety, the kind of universalist messaging they desperately wish to deploy in order to galvanize their political program will never read as authentically as it does when it is in the hands of the left. They just can’t come out and say “Nowak is our George Floyd, nyah nyah.” It’s also the same reason why the left will never get their chud: what works for one doesn’t necessarily work for the other and opportunists on both sides always forget this very important libidinal logic.

The recent murder of Henry Nowak in Southampton and the BLM social justice movement following the murder of George Floyd six years ago in Minneapolis stem from the same problem: the abject failures of social democracy to create a meaningful compromise with capitalism’s inherently exploitative and alienating domination. In order for it to gain political legitimacy, social democracy relies on a vast web of interconnected agencies—NGOs, activist groups, lobbies and political parties—to more or less engineer social consciousness. These are not democratic institutions per se, rather a panoply of particularized interest groups and so they will necessarily alienate a meaningful portion of the population, even as they gain success in shifting public policy over the years and decades. Because of the aggressiveness of these groups and their highly bureaucratized nature once they attain power, corruption, sclerosis and, eventually, breakdown are a given.

The public outcry and protest movement that followed the George Floyd murder was addressed to a real problem: police brutality and institutionalized anti-black racism. Unfortunately, the measures that were taken to address the problem, social democratic agitation for state-sponsored regulation of the police force, are inherently inadequate for the task. As a kind of morphine for a terminally ill patient, social democracy provides relief against the spreading disease of capitalism, but it does not cure it and, more often than not, ends up inflaming the symptoms. The UK, being a much more advanced social democratic order than ours, with nary a protection for the individual against mobilized state intervention, now has, in the Nowak murder, a vivid and electrifying image that represents the inadequacy and injustice of the social democratic welfare state: an innocent life begging for lifesaving aid while being handcuffed by a police officer who was more than likely mechanically following directives about who to trust and who not to trust, directives he’d just learned at a sensitivity session organized by the Southampton Police’s HR department.

The right jealously looks at the spirited protest movement, the largest in history, that brought out what looked like the entire US population in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. When Salt Lake City puts up a BLM banner by the highway, you know that a big moment is happening. The right simply will never get numbers like these. The reason is because they haven’t yet discovered how to meaningfully address the problem they’re trying to fix, which costs them in the streets. Whenever the welfare state slips and reveals its inherent contradiction, as it has in the Nowak murder, the first thing they do is go hunting for immigrants and non-whites, a strategy that understandably alienates half the population, a portion of the demos who for very good reason favor the social democratic order’s emphasis on equality over personal freedom. Conversely, the history of anti-black racial domination as one of the subsets of capitalist alienation, is widely recognized as a crisis. In the US, we have fought two revolutions for the purpose of unshackling the demos and addressing this crisis: the first, the American Revolution, which was fought against the ancien regime of the remnants of feudalism and the second, the American Civil War, which was fought against those within our newly founded polity who would seek to limit the extension of those hard-won freedoms to all. In George Floyd’s dying breaths we recognized that there is still unfinished business from those revolutions. This is a universalized issue, meaning, within our plurality, it unifies. The right is good at reminding us of our birthright freedom but they are really bad at what George Floyd left us with, the task of unifying within disparity.

It’s only natural that an affect would arise from the political energy one dedicates to certain political causes. For the right, the chud is an image that fits like a glove: a full representation of dumb masculine power that plays into our frontier ethos, itself a valuable field of civic pride for anyone who holds onto the promise of freedom insured by the Founding Fathers. When the left tries to take up this image, it’s a little more awkward: our focus on equality, pluralism and on the unfinished business of the American Revolution vitiates against such a forthright expression of traditional masculinity. It’s just not in our wheelhouse.

The same goes for the right with respect to social justice, an issue which for them fits just as awkwardly. They are correct in pointing to the problem: the social democratic welfare state has created a mess. And they are also correct in blaming the left for this mess. So long as the left turns its back on grassroots, working class-oriented populism, it will seek out the social democratic alternative and find the same results: a highly agitated and angry rightwing energy field that periodically comes in to “clean up the mess” that the welfare state creates by design. Yet, unfortunately for the right, when it tries to exploit these crises for political gain, they regress to an alienating nativism that puts off half the population—and for a very good reason: nativism has no place in a world after the American Revolution and the American Civil War. When they take to the streets to “unite the right” or to foment a universalist movement like the one created in the wake of the George Floyd’s murder, it’s the same as when the Democrats manufacture a chud: there’s just something that’s not working about it, like they rented an ill-fitting suit from a cheap haberdasher. Maybe it’s the right suit for the right occasion. But they got the size all wrong and they look dumb.

Last week, Democrats lost two of their most prestigious generals leading their unerring war against the Great Orange Satan.

One, a late night TV talk show host, served the cause of spreading TDS across the country over the course of one and a half Trump presidencies using a kind of partisan insouciance once reserved for open access programming: his smarmy, cynical and unimaginative monologues brought to mind the myopic and aggressive vituperations of Fox News’ answer to network late night programming, Gutfeld, only without the expectations for stupidity that audiences usually reserve for the right and without the rightful understanding that cable TV is a different sport altogether than the traditional networks.

The other general, a Republican Kentucky House Representative, lost his primary—the most expensive in Congressional history—to a Trump-endorsed former Navy SEAL because over the course of the latter two years the incumbent could not be bothered to resist the immense media attention one immediately gathers these days by the mere utterance of the name of a certain pedophile with an island. In the Great War Against the Great Orange Satan, rubbing the lantern to conjure the specter of Epstein represents a particular array of munitions for those interested in “standing up” to the so-called dictator sitting in the Oval Office. They let out their volleys accordingly. Such is the appetite for this kind of spectacle that the incumbent, like many a Never Trumper before him, became only the latest media darling for the chardonnay progressive set merely by deciding that there was a “there” somewhere in all of the conspiracy and that “there” surely must lead to the holy grail of either a) future impeachment or b), Democrats most lurid fever dream, a tasty show trial and handcuffs.

As with the Trump Cabinet, selection is a matter of loyalty to the cause. From Bondi to Patel, it has never been a matter of debate that adherence to the vision up top matters more than experience or talent. Same goes, apparently, on the liberal side (not that they’ll ever admit it). Never mind that Colbert’s jokes were unfunny, never mind that Massie, so unlike his fellow Kentuckian libertarian in the Senate, Rand Paul, didn’t seem ever to do or say anything particularly effective or illuminating. On the ladder leading up to generalship for Democrats, skill, talent, effectiveness, these don’t matter. You just need to swear by the oath: I hereby promise to say bad things about the Great Orange Satan. No other qualification necessary.

One has to wonder about motivations. Surely, at some point it must have occurred to Mr. Colbert that his one-trick pony was getting stale, no? After all, just because audiences laugh and producers say “more” doesn’t mean that one can’t look oneself in the mirror. Similarly, Mr. Massie must have known he was headed for disaster, that, in braying loudly about Epstein and flaunting his own so-called independence—mostly a myth as he, like another of his kin, MTG, voted with his party in Congress almost 100% of the time—he would be inviting a brutal primary that would certainly stanch his congressional career. And yet they both went trucking along. You see, it’s not easy to look at oneself in the mirror when the money is rolling in. It has a way of fogging up the glass. It turns out that the same sort of self-enrichment our POTUS is so often accused of pertains as well to our liberal heroes, though, again, don’t expect the libs to admit it.

A recent piece in Compact magazine illustrates well how Thomas Massie’s convenient anti-Trump rhetoric was an indication of a Republican Party undergoing systemwide change in the wake of two Trump terms and that the chief goals for Republican Party reform represented by MAGA—populist, isolationist, nationalist—were threatened by Massie’s unhinged instrumentalization of the media for the purposes of personal fame and a future career doing whatever it is that famous politicians do after they’re ejected from Congress (maybe expect a sweet spot on a CNN show soon, the kind that another Never Trumper, John Bolton, was gifted for the outstanding accomplishment of saying something bad about Trump). I don’t have any skin in the game of capitalist politics, but the diagnosis sounds right to me: the allure of quick hits and quick clicks in the modern attention economy is enough to derail any principled legislator with the promise of a spotlight on the nation’s screens, if only you say something bad about Trump.

Conversely, a recent New York Times opinion piece made the ludicrous claim that Colbert’s exit from the national stage served as an example of a "politically inconvenient" figure being pushed out of view and that he represented some sort of last hurrah of an old guard of network television dating back to Carson. I rather think it’s the opposite: Mr. Colbert was a useful avatar for millions of liberals giving voice to their anti-Trump obsessions, an obsession which the Democratic Party, itself a very politically convenient formation, has adopted as its chief policy platform in lieu of much more truly "politically inconvenient" positions such as healthcare reform. In gleefully harnessing rank partisan affect, Colbert did more damage to the late show brand than any YouTuber, who the Times piece seems to believe is the future of talk show programming, could ever hope to achieve. The demise of the Late Show should serve as a cautionary tale for those who wish to align with fashionable and, yes, politically convenient rhetoric at the expense of a more universalist posture. That's what made Colbert’s predecessors great. Years from now, after Trump Derangement Syndrome finally withers away, we will look back at Colbert's snide partisan snipes for what they really are, cringe-inducing politicizations of the public sphere, and we will continue to wistfully hope for the glory days of Letterman and Carson, who were able to harness political divides for the betterment of the public, not its coarsening. If there is any hope for the future, we should be gifted with, not Colbert, but another of their ilk.

One has to wonder who’s next, who next will Democrats choose as their avatar of smug, self-congratulatory social justice. By all looks of it, it’s Joe Kent, which is actually a troubling thought: like Massie before him, Kent appears to be an opportunist searching for a primo spot on the supermarket aisle endcap. What’s troubling about it is what was troubling about Massie as well as what is troubling about progressives cottoning to Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens—a willingness for liberals to dally with subtle antisemitism for the purposes of political power. Because of the bombings and the mass deaths of innocents prosecuted by Israel in full view of TikTok feeds over the last three years and because Trump is associated with Bibi, antizionism is now coded as anti-Trump. As Marxist scholar Moishe Postone once said, “Antizionism is the anti-imperialism of fools,” which is another way of saying that there’s an element of “methinks the lady protest too much” in too vocal an opposition to Israel. If you think Democrats will be able to resist sticking their paws in this cookie jar just because it involves a little ol’ thing called antisemitism, I have a bridge to sell you. Joe Kent, a man who told Tucker Carlson on his show that he thinks that Israel is holding Trump’s family as ransom, is their next idiot general and don’t think that his Protocols of the Elders of Zion-adjacent rhetoric is going to stop them from latching on to him.

It does not matter that they have sacrificed a once universalizing entertainment product known as the late night talk show to the wolves of TDS. It does not matter that they have made hypocritical their heavily policed political coalition with alliances with figures with odious culture war views. Democrats don’t care about any of this. They care about only one thing: “from groin to chin.” I am quoting a popular meme of a woman on camera screaming at the top of her lungs while at the wheel which has been memorialized with an accompanying heavy metal soundtrack. Her impotent rage represents in its most advanced form the derangement that has set in over the liberal class who have long given up their feeble pretense to equanimity in favor of their “dark woke” histrionics. I don’t know if it is more funny or more true, but, then again, what is truly funny is usually funnily true. Democrats have succumbed to the same sort of “deplorable” disease they blame on their political enemies. Nancy Pelosi is often quoted as saying that we need a strong GOP. She’s right. But in order for that to work, we also need a strong Democratic Party. There hasn’t been one in sight since 2016.

The comedian Tim Dillon is a very funny man but he is also pretty insightful, which actually isn’t saying very much since you can’t really be a funny comedian unless you are insightful. Still, I suppose his podcast might be classified more as insightful than funny and that’s why that’s more important to me at the moment; insightfulness is in short order these days. The Tim Dillon Show is usually an hour chock full of steel manning the hidden presumptions of the day in order to illuminate their perversity. He takes to its logical conclusion the overriding logos of current events in order that we might see clearly just how it is that “things aren’t right.” Sometimes he starts his podcast with little sketches that are funnier than SNL and that also dig deeper. In one recent one he took us back to a scene on Thanksgiving 2024 where he’s questioning the validity of the case for Kamala and being harangued by relatives for being a fascist only to fast-forward one year to Thanksgiving 2025 to show himself with those same relatives under a Satanic spell worshipping over the altar of Palantir. “What was I thinking,” is one of his refreshing and disarming go-to’s on his podcast. Another disarming thing he does is send up his weight and oftentimes his sexuality (he’s gay). He’s Chris Farley mixed with George Carlin. Technically, he’s part of the bro podcast circuit but he’s much more expansive than what you typically find around those parts.

He went on one of his signature tirades on his last episode decoding the specter of the shopping mall as a modern day site of civilizational ruin: all that this centralized marketplace represents—the purchasing-power to shop, the capacity to commiserate with one’s fellow man, the willingness to pass the time in an easeful manner in public—is now gone. Everyone stays at home, orders their food on Seamless, purchases their TVs on Amazon, texts one’s friends instead of meeting them out, Netflix and chills instead of walking around and being surprised by life. These days, now that I spend more of my time outside of the city, I am privy much more to the state of affairs at the shopping mall and my experience supports Dillon’s. Recalling my teenage mall rat years, a period of my life when three hours on a Friday night running around and smoking cigarettes and evading security guards under the umbrella of diffused lighting and the charming juxtaposition of persiflage and muzak counted as a thrilling evening (and it was), I am at pains to deny that comparing the dynamic gallivanting of my days as a sixteen-year-old to the torpor of a 52-year-old man entering and exiting shops with no customers fills me with sorrow for some sort of lost world. Perhaps one of the great ironies of the age of the iPhone and social media is that what in the past seemed to represent most fully the social corrosion of commodity fetishism and the marketing of social relations—and in that latter day degradation the shopping mall was most emblematic—today represents a bygone era that, in light of the dystopian quietism of social life in 2026, appears downright quaint.

We weren’t supposed to think fondly of shopping malls. Now we do because we walk around inside them as though visiting the ruins of a civilization, though one we continue to live in. “That world is long gone,” Dillon says, and it’s true. The cathedral of commerce that was the shopping mall was a poor stand-in for the public square. No real love should be lost on the death of what was always a grotesque sop to a culture that had lost its capacity to self-engineer its social reality without the intervention of consumerism. Yet it was always thought that the destruction of the cathedral would usher in the return of that which it had sought to replace, real civic life. Yet, the uncomfortable quiet of Seamless-delivered meals, Amazon-delivered home goods and thumb-swiped dating rituals that has in fact replaced the cathedral is actually worse than the originally bad thing. In the expectation that physical bodies would collide with each other in real time, the shopping mall at least made an attempt to present a simulacrum of spontaneous civic life, whereas the tech overlord-led reality of rationalized life by the glow of a tiny screen doesn’t even try to approximate the sensation of it. Instead of the thrill of the unknown, something the shopping mall might have once in a while delivered, nowadays we make do with the safety of control.

This secret world into which we have all been thrust, a world which Tim Dillon’s tirade on shopping malls was clearly designed to illuminate, did not come to us by way of democratic disputation. There was no plebiscitary oversight that authorized the presence of surveillance cameras at every intersection. There was no “town hall” meeting that gave permission to allow real estate conglomerates to gut Main Street of its shops. There was no committee you attended to weigh in on the impact of allowing tech overlords in San Francisco to expropriate the emission of pheromones by people on the street that might have once led to a dinner date for the purpose of selling apps containing digitized images of those same people who still live next door to you but are now farther away than someone in Antarctica. All of these “developments” have come with meager benefits compared to the costs. One chief cost is the conspicuous silence we all live with now. In the Teens it seemed that tech was going to liberate us. The loud dispersion effects of Twitter and Instagram promised to eradicate bigotry, or at least that’s what the CEO’s of those companies were saying they were promising. The disciplinary weapon of wokeism that came disguised in that promise is now a recent relic of a much more disputative moment but its discipline lingers in the quiet we all live with today. Rather than having opened up debate in the public square it has closed it. The once raucous screaming of civic life has been funneled away into the noisy bombs of Palantir-guided missiles, where the sound of disputation is now carried out more violently in far off lands.

The future won’t look like 1984, nor will it look like THX-1138. At this point one is well-advised to retain a degree of skepticism with regard to overly distinct visions of what in fact will be. But what the dystopian prophecies of science-fiction got right was just how quiet things are and the evidence is everywhere if you’ll just listen. The malls are quiet now. So are the churches. So is Main Street. This isn’t the kind of quiet that you find in the woods or at a retreat. In those places, there is a profundity to the silence. The sibilant gusts through the leaves are always giant, careful whispers whose grainy texture comes chock full of information ready for decoding. The synchronized breathing of a room full of meditators, though it exists just at the threshold of audibility, is a kind of deeply familiar rumble that we nonetheless register, the kind of gentle rumble we must know somehow from our now-forgotten time in the womb. In the theater there are two kinds of quiet. When actors are not doing well, the audience’s energy is askance and dispersed. Everyone is breathing at their own pace, thinking about their laundry. The joke that doesn’t land reveals a pretty empty quiet. But when actors are doing well, when there is a real, dramatic moment happening and people are connecting, the quiet that is revealed is that quiet of synchronized breathing, the deep, thick quiet of a people united. Everywhere we go today it is that former, much more empty, quiet. The pending deliveries and overflowing inboxes atomize all of us and our breathing goes out of sync. And we chose none of this and we will continue to go on accepting that which we do not want.

The secret world relies on this kind of quiet. In the secret world, the word “privacy” takes on a double-meaning and that double-meaning persists by dint of the quiet that is imposed on us. We have all lost our privacy, they say. Big Tech harvests your data. Influencers broadcast their entire lives for the whole world to see. At the same time, everything is private: no one sees you hitting it off with anyone, no one sees you going into that store all of the time, you are not seen by your fellow townspeople at church any longer. We have retreated into a secret world of complete personal control, yet how can anything be personal when we have lost our personhood? I am not sure how to break the quiet that glues this weird, dehumanizing consensus that has come to dominate our lives like a black cloud hovering over our heads. The secret world, the world without shopping malls, offers us the chance to escape the annoying responsibility of having to live with each other. It’s difficult to put a price on that kind of convenience. I let my dogs out in the backyard today and the morning birds were serenading us. They say there is a lot less birdsong, something to do with environmental shifts. Still, it was pretty raucous. I stood there and waited for my dogs to do their business before coming back inside to write this article. Some conversation was happening and it made me sad to know that it might be the loudest thing I hear today.

Don’t think there isn’t a connection between Trump’s recent fracas with the Pope and the record high the S&P hit the other day because there is.

The S&P closed above 7,000 on Wednesday and, as of the time of this writing 48 hours later, remains at that record high. The New York Times was quick to ascribe the usual prescience to the invisible hand of the market, attributing a hunch that the war in Iran was coming to a close to the stock market’s unusually high benchmark.

Simultaneously, it appears that the war of words between the Trump administration and the Papal See—a war that involved an AI mockery of Christ, a Vice President lecturing one of the most prominent spiritual leaders in the world about “morals,” a reprimand about justice from the Pope himself and a vituperative tirade on Truth Social—has now at long last subsided.

What do these two seemingly unrelated events have to do with each other?

If there’s one unswerving fact that may be observed from the last ten years it is that the Art of the Deal is always in effect. That simple craft, and the belief that every single task to be accomplished by the highest governmental office in the world must use it, is the ontological nutshell of Trump’s foreign policy and even a dust-up with the Pope himself can be seen as one of its manifestations.

To illustrate this, come follow me on a little fairy tale I will unwind for you . . . .

Let’s say I’m a carpetbagging oilman who’s striking it rich in some small town that just discovered a well and I’m suing a contractor who worked for me recently and made out with their fee and little else to show for the work they were supposed to do for me.

Now, in this fictional small town there is a local vicar who’s regularly quoted pontificating in the pages of the town’s newspaper, let’s call it the Smithville Gazette. The entire town follows every word he ever prints. The vicar is a very trusted man around these parts. You see, the people of Smithville are a pious bunch.

In the latest edition of the Smithville Gazette runs the latest opinion piece from the vicar in which he decries my law suit as an unjust exercise of my financial power that distracts this quiet town from its usual quiet business with dramatic upheavals affecting the quiet townspeople’s everyday lives.

Sacre bleu!

Now, I don’t know about you, but if I’m that oilman, I know for sure that the legal team representing that contractor who stiffed me is reading that opinion piece hot off the press and is eagerly anticipating that I’m going to flinch, that I’ll come out with my tail between my legs and, in an effort to tidy up the affair now that I’ve been given a good talking to, look to end the law suit with a settlement that’s favorable to their side.

But they forget that, as was mentioned, the Art of the Deal holds above everything else.

So I run an ad the next day in the Smithville Gazette saying the vicar is ignorant about “what really matters,” which is the wealth of the town, which I, as the oilman governing this newly discovered well, will be increasing exponentially as soon as the court hears my case against the thief who made out with my money. I explicitly tie the court’s verdict on my side when this case ends to the affluence of the people of Smithville.

“Just you wait, people. You’ll be swimming in money.”

“How DARE you say that to the vicar?” The outcry is loud and extensive. The entire literati of Smithville are up in arms over my “senseless” and “insane” rebuke.

How could I have been so insensitive? Is nothing sacred?

But they forget that pesky thing I keep going on about: the Art of the Deal.

Within one week, that thieving, conniving contractor—the guy who came in with a lot of words saying he was going to triple my profits after he’s finished constructing a new, more efficient drilling site but instead made out with a fat fee I wrote a check for and left me with a malfunctioning site—now, so the nice local judge decrees after slamming down their gavel, has to pay me double the amount.

Smithville is rich!

That contractor knew he was in deep shit after I ran that ad in the local paper. He knew I wasn’t going to back down, not even after the most highly esteemed spiritual leader of the town of Smithville, that local vicar, thought he could dissuade me from carrying out my recompense. That contractor knew that his goose was cooked because all of his leverage had evaporated with that ad and the day in court would show that my case was sound.

I could have backed down. I could have lost my spirit. After all, the most moral voice in the region told the entire town of Smithville that my law suit was unjust. Someone else would have caved, folded and done everything they could to make it go away, even agree to let a contractor make out with millions by taking the law suit to settlement.

But, because my one true maxim is the Art of the Deal and nothing else, I stuck to my guns and the town of Smithville is about to get richer as a result.

Thank you for following me on this tangled rendition and I hope that it makes the case clear.

The fracas with the Pope, contrary to an array of seemingly knowledgeable heads, was yet another instance of this Art of the Deal I’ve just told a fictionalized version of. And the S&P’s closing on Wednesday is the first sign that this deal is soon coming to a favorable close. Not for nothing did the market rally after Trump “stood up” to the Pope. In fact, today we are hearing murmurs about Trump himself going to Pakistan to sign a peace treaty. Seems like there’s a connection there.

Imagine you are a high level Iranian negotiator watching that war of words between the President and the Pope. You know that all of the bombs that have been dropping on Tehran have come about because of one thing only: Trump. So what he says goes. Now it seems that the highest spiritual authority in the West is trying to cast a negative light on the efforts of this man, efforts which are the sine qua non of this entire upheaval which you are now in Islamabad trying to put a peaceable end to. OF COURSE, you are going to pull up a chair, grab some popcorn and watch how this all pans out. Because it MATTERS. It matters for your negotiation! What this Cheetoh Head says in the wake of this censure on the part of the living representative of the West’s most sacred God, Jesus Christ, matters very much for the future of these negotiations.

And what do you see Cheetoh Head doing? Oh, yeah, that big God that I’m supposed to care so much about? Watch this, and out comes a dose of AI-generated sacrilege. “Doctor” Trump taking charge of Christ’s role, so that the millions of MAGA Christians under his thumb can be reminded of the Faustian pact they signed when they voted for him.

And you are that Iranian negotiator and you go, “Damn, that mofo is loco.” Nothing is going to stop him, not even that old guy in Vatican City with the hat. You are that Iranian negotiator thinking to yourself, I don’t know how in the hell this happened, but whoever is at the top of this pyramid just impersonated their most sacred symbol. I don’t think we have much leverage. Get his guy on the phone. It’s time to make a deal.

As Professor Cutrone from the Sublation Media podcast never tires of reminding us, Trump does not care about the midterms, he does not care about the GOP, he does not care about who wins 2028, he does not care about his “ego” or his “wealth” or any other such lazy ascription liberals still, over a decade after they first experienced the trauma of the golden escalator, continue to hysterically carp about (God help them).

He cares only about one thing: changing facts on the ground, permanently. The world will be left in an irrevocable place after Trump leaves office and only history will tell what America’s fate will be as a result. But if you look at things dialectically and honestly—again, a task liberals are incapable of performing despite all their education (TDS is a bitch)—you will see that, regardless of whether it works, it was all done intentionally and with great foresight.

Iran and tariffs are the only two things Trump has gone on consistently about for the last forty years and everything he does should be seen in light of that double obsession. It’s the same as Bernie’s “oligarchs,” a mantra that has occupied the center stage of the man’s thinking for the entirety of his adult life. You might not like the way he talks or what his culture war politics are. But that doesn’t ipso facto mean that because you don’t like it he is therefore an “egomaniac,” an “idiot,” or any other such psychologized reduction that makes you feel better at night.

As far as Trump is concerned, Iran and tariffs are cryptographic keys which, once they are permitted to unlock the holy grail, will yield a new American Age. You can agree or disagree with whether or not this is true, whether these obsessions do in fact reflect a state of affairs in geopolitics that, once addressed, will usher in a new era. I certainly have my doubts.

What you can’t do, however, is pretend that this isn’t what he is doing. Anything else, whether it’s conservative fanboying or liberal pathologizing, is sheer dogmatism. Even the Pope was recently made aware of this.

And to carry out the will to see those obsessions realized, it will always be about, as it has always been about, the Art of the Deal.

The ongoing conversation regarding whether or not to cancel Hasan Piker demonstrates that a robustly anti-Israel position on the part of any prominent political voice on the left now contains little of the traditional radioactivity that such a position would have assuredly contained prior to October 7th. When a leading congressman like Ro Khanna can associate openly with a Hasan Piker, face blowback, yet continue his hold on influence and power, you know that a fundamental pillar of political legitimacy for the pro-Israel cause has been permanently dismantled. No amount of reasoning, lobbying, handwringing or attempted canceling is going to change that.

Piker would have never gotten ten meters close to power prior to the fateful day of October 7th, but today he is inches away. This fact must be recognized for what it is, a bellwether event in the foreign policy posture regarding Israel roiling through the capitalist parties, especially the Democratic Party. It is an irrefutable piece of evidence that the days when criticism of America’s relationship with Israel reached a fast limit in mainstream discourse are now conclusively over.

I am not here to litigate whether or not that is a problem. I leave that to the pro-Israel and the pro-Palestine voices to discuss. Insofar as I believe that Israel is a critical political formation for Jews worldwide, and especially American Jews, I am pro-Israel. Insofar as I believe that the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank should end immediately I am pro-Palestine. Sadly, we don’t live in a world where taking up such a position, one that I find to be a reasonable one, can do anything more but make me the friend of none and the enemy of many.

Rather, the importance of the Hasan Piker imbroglio as I see it stems not from what it says about the decades-long conflict in the Levant but from how it sheds light on a topic not oft-discussed, and that is the strictly political content of October 7th. The fact that Hamas, in carrying out the horror of October 7th, effectively renounced any claim to legitimate governance on the international stage, and therefore turned itself into a terrorist organization by default, does not then mean that the political repercussions we are still witnessing as a result of that day have nothing to do with what that organization intended. In other words, what is happening with Hasan Piker and the Democratic Party today is precisely the sort of thing which Hamas had in mind in carrying out October 7th.

The same sort of impoverished thinking that would assign Mad Hatter irrationality to every single utterance on the part of Donald Trump is what refuses to see that there is a rational political intent behind even the most horrifying acts. The “propaganda of the deed” has always had a powerful effect on the world stage. Just ask Gavrilo Princip. This is not the same as saying that it is morally correct to carry out such acts, nor even that it is politically prudent. It is only to say that an unwillingness to countenance how the perpetrators of horror might have been thinking rationally about the political consequences of their actions renders irrational those who make accusations about supposedly supporting terror. We have seen liberals make this sort of mistake over and over again for the past ten years with regard to Trump. In this very specific regard, Hamas is not so dissimilar.

If anything, such rationality amplifies the horror of that day twentyfold. Since Hamas were thinking rationally on October 7th, they had to have also understood what the reaction would be, how the Goliath would carry out its recompense and what lethal effect it would have on the Palestinians. In fact, the asymmetrical reaction was part of Hamas’ political intent. And this makes the attacks even more despicable than if they were carried out by lunatics or a “death cult.”

And so, here we stand today, witnessing a decisive shift on the politically possible, at least when it comes to the internal affairs of the Democratic Party. Hamas knew full well how October 7th would play out in the hearts and minds of much of the Democratic Party’s base. They understood that a large, vocal part of the Democratic Party is sympathetic to their political goals (the “paraglider left”) and that an even larger, more vocal part, while overtly condemning Hamas, nonetheless places more importance on the struggles of Palestinians than on the victims of October 7th. Long nascent topics, such as military aid to Israel, the difference between antizionism and antisemitism, and the role of AIPAC in American politics, now receive much more mainstream attention than they ever would have in the past.

Again, I am not writing this to discuss the impact this shift in the Overton Window is going to have on American Jews. I will not deny that, so far, the effects have not been good. But that is a much larger conversation and, at any rate, does not have much to say about politics, which is what I would prefer to focus on here. All I’m saying is that one is advised to consider that the shift in the political landscape of the Democratic Party presents favorable conditions for the long term political goals of Hamas and its benefactor Iran and that such change in the political winds was likely at front of mind before carrying out the attacks.

Hamas knew that October 7th was a Rubicon beyond which the consequences for Israel’s standing on the world stage would be immense and favorable to its benefactor Iran. They had to have known that their actions on that day would inevitably one day cause the confrontation we are now seeing over the Strait of Hormuz. Notice that not a single country has dared to join the United States in this overseas affair ostensibly targeting Iran’s nuclear facilities, no matter how high Russian LNG costs as a direct result. The political wisdom of the day would have once made even just oblique rhetorical support of the war on the part of European heads of state a politically advantageous statement. Yet, today it is very different: now the world sees the US and Israel acting on its own to bomb a “defenseless” country and if you think that October 7th has nothing to do with that little victory in the information war, then I have a bridge to sell you.

Don’t think that Bibi likewise did not anticipate this sort of thing. The Likud Party’s explicit policy framework calls for the sort of isolationist and totalizing crackdown we are now witnessing on the part of Israel, not only on the world stage, but within its own borders, as the recent news coming from the West Bank illustrates. The end of the neoliberal era has fractured the international consensus that gave lip service to entities such as the ICC which now can no longer expect even that. And Israel has followed suit, liberated from onerous internationalist and NGO expectations to carry out its own more contemporary political objectives.

This, too, was part of Hamas’ aims. Having been given the gift of a Trump presidency, it knew that the world had irrevocably moved out of the neoliberal era, with a more overtly transactional posture on the part of the US that inevitably strengthens the bonds between countries like the US and Israel. No longer hampered by UN scolds, the US has now unleashed the most fulsome coordination with Israeli military aims the world has yet seen. Streets in the Holy Land are being renamed in honor of the Don.

This should not be confused with the antisemitic trope of “doing Israel’s bidding” which seeks to ascribe Israeli manipulation to every single Middle Eastern foreign policy plank at the Pentagon. Rather, the level of coordination in confronting Iran which we are witnessing is of mutual benefit to the parties involved, both the imperial state and the client state. Such coordination has always been in the cards, but technocratic leaders laboring under the artifice of the neoliberal era always searched for alternatives. Hamas knew that the neoliberal era was over and that such overt coordination, the ramifications for international standing be damned, were now back on the table.

The outcome of the current bombing campaign against Iran is by no means certain. But it is fairly clear that the Middle East has been transformed. It is highly likely that Iran comes out of this war both weakened and strengthened. Weakened in the sense it will no longer be able to project power on the world stage in the way it used to. Strengthened in the sense that the political goals it once had no longer need such power projection on the part of one hostile actor. Those goals are now imbricated in the various political networks of the international stage and it is virtually inconceivable to see this happening without October 7th.

Hasan Piker, whether or not the centrists successfully cancel him, is not the last anti-Israel voice on the left from whom we will be hearing. It used to be the case that people like Hasan would always speak about the “one state” or the “two state” solution. You don’t hear that talk anymore. Instead, it’s all “apartheid state,” “genocide” and, to a growing extent, “America First.” This is the new deal.

Mind you, Hamas is, aside from destined for the fires of hell, responsible for a giant act of political follow-through, for it was the reelection of Bibi, after he was ousted and replaced by the hardliner Natali Bennett—only to be reinstated shortly thereafter—that had all of the major periodicals decrying the death of the two state solution. Again, this is not to say that Israel “caused” October 7th, as many deranged, antisemitic voices often love to go on about. But it is to say that the outlook that presents the political choices of the Israeli state in isolation from the political choices of a terrorist organization like Hamas is a rather naive one.

The view that takes seriously how politics informs even the most horrific, inexplicable acts is not a view that casts any moral judgement. Moral judgements are problematic when projected onto complex systems such as international relations and geopolitics. This is why statements like “Israel has a right to exist” sound to me like propaganda, for in what meaningful sense can we ascribe the kind of agency necessary for the possession of rights onto a nation-state? We need to shed this dogmatic insistence on morality. It infects the body politic. It results in the sort of toothless stridency of the pro-Palestinian movement, a movement whose only truly substantive goal is the fortification of the ranks of the Democratic Party. It also results in the demagogic contempt on the part of nationalist blowhards of anyone questioning our relationship with Israel. Moralism is what creates those stunning displays of unreason.

Refusing to bolster the Democratic Party does not in any way vitiate against the righteousness of seeking to end the occupation of Palestine. Nor does the refusal to be swayed into foreign adventurism in any way question the incredible and positive importance that Israel as a nation-state has for the American project. These combined platforms may sound strange, but they only do so because of how collapsed and narrow is the bandwidth of the politically possible in the West.

If anything good may be said to be coming about from the Hasan Piker event, may it be that somehow it indicates a widening of the politically possible and that such widening will create opportunities to support the eradication of Palestinian suffering while simultaneously protecting the security of American Jews.

The pop-cultural forms that come to define the character and style of a particular decade don’t usually take shape until about the fourth year in. Before that point, expressions, art and commodities still carry the signature legacy of the previous decade and are only just beginning their metamorphosis into cultural forms that define the novel sensibility. Cultural forms of the first part of a decade are thus transitional ones. It is only by around the midpoint of the decade that they have evolved into full representations of the new spirit of the times.

The 1980s presents a particularly dramatic example of this type of cultural transition and one that is motivated by political economic developments to a degree not usually as visible in other decades. With two extremely consequential presidential elections earmarking, first, the birth of the new decade in 1980 and, later in 1984, the full realization of that decade’s spiritual character, the 1980s exemplifies the manner in which cultural forms may undergo metamorphosis according to the dynamics of political economy.

The Reagan Revolution and its infusion of neoliberal economics into the mainstream happened in two critical stages, during his first election and then in his reelection. In the former, the new political economic character of financialized capital and skyrocketing of commodification, which made up part of the dynamic of neoliberalism and which would come to define the decade later on, was only just beginning. Visibly, 1980-1984 more or less looked like the 1970s, though with some attenuation of the disarray and decadence that characterized the 70s. In music, fashion and cinema, you could see the decade beginning to shed the forms of the previous decade, forms which themselves expressed legacies from their previous decade of the 1960s: the disappointment and anomie of the gritty 1970s can be seen in the light of the unkept promises of the countercultural revolution.

Yet, by 1984 and the followup presidential election, when the Reagan-Bush ticket trounced the Mondale-Ferraro one, the sensibility of the new decade had finally taken shape, and the culture at large reflected the change. To name only two of the biggest occurrences in the pop cultural realm, 1984 saw the release of the Yamaha DX7, a mass-market synthesizer that changed the sound of pop music virtually overnight. It was also the year of the release of the movie Gremlins, which codified the fusion of schlock, humor and horror that would go on to define much of the broader thriller genre for the rest of the decade and beyond. The cultural messaging inlaid in the textures of these new forms—shinier, brighter pop music and wittier, more focussed filmic entertainment—carries the imprint of the general evolution of new productive modes that characterized 1980s political economy, most notably in the realms of technology and marketing.

FIRST BLOOD

The correspondence between the development of cultural forms during the 1980s and the two stages of the Reagan Revolution in 1980 and 1984 make an interesting character study out of the first two movies in the Rambo franchise, First Blood and Rambo: First Blood II, which came out in 1982 and 1985 respectively. Only three years separate the two movies, yet they each reflect a wildly different aspect of the warrior ethos that defines the franchise. The difference can be ascribed to the distinct progression of the political economic regime from the 1970s into the 1980s and a critical look at both movies reveals changing times in general and the dynamics of neoliberal political economy more specifically.

In 1982, cultural forms wrestled with new dynamics, yet they betrayed the techniques and ideas of the 1970s. Watching First Blood today makes it impossible to deny an obvious relationship to the perhaps defining Vietnam movie of the 1970s, The Deer Hunter (1978). There is the obvious cinematographical affinity: somber greys and earth tones abound and close-ups and long cuts provide psychological realism. There is also the forested montane background (Pennsylvania in The Deer Hunter, Washington in First Blood) of which both movies dedicate large chunks of time to exploring the wilder portions. The rich colors of Kodak film stock which flattered natural settings in many iconic movies from the 1970s, such as Terence Malick’s Badlands, and which foisted heavenly natural splendor as a tragic counterweight to ‘70s economic decline, is preserved in First Blood as a narrative technique, setting John Rambo’s hero’s journey of traumatic descent against the stunning, beatific wilds of the American heartland.

However, the film also diverts from, and not simply reproduces, old forms: if The Deer Hunter, in showcasing a group of steelworkers in small town America, can be seen as an objectification of working class decline, pictorialized through the lens of wartime traumatic encounter, First Blood, in pondering the meltdown of one rogue vet, subjectivizes that decline as mere intrapsychic conflict. Rambo’s reenactment of Vietnam guerrilla warfare in the wilds of Washington State not only reflects the heightened individualism taking shape in the Reagan Revolution, it also fully dispenses with the preoccupations with the class compromise between labor and capital on which The Deer Hunter maintained focus, albeit tenuously.

The only hint we have as to working class subjectivity in First Blood is in the opening scene when the homosociality of wartime fraternal bonds is shattered by the revelation that Rambo’s platoon-mate has died of complications from exposure to Agent Orange, a fall which The Deer Hunter arrives to only by the end of the movie—though with a different emphasis on the horrors of war—with the suicide that occurs during a game of Russian Roulette. This indicates that, as far as the Rambo franchise is concerned, collectivity is out and individualism is in: from that point on it sets loose any critique of the demise of the Fordist dispensation and traffics merely in the psychologized mythology of lonely heroics. In this way, First Blood immediately and somewhat explicitly picks up where The Deer Hunter implicitly left off, with the disintegration of working class subjectivity in favor of entrepreneurial self-preservation, a transition that is foregrounded by historical developments in political economy, namely the shift from Nixonian maintenance of the New Deal to early Reaganite neoliberalism.

This turn enables First Blood to explore new dynamics in the political economic frontiers of the 1980s and to begin to constitute the new forms which anxieties over those frontiers tend to produce. Indeed, as something of a call out to the slasher genre, the first installment of the Rambo franchise presents a curious development. The advent and popularity of the slasher movie in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s can be seen as a reflection of mass anxiety over growing complexity and disappointment in the political economy and public life: mystification with difficult evolutions such as the loss of domestic industrial manufacturing, the reeling from oil shocks and the unpegging of the gold standard, along with reactionary backlash against the counterculture, all congeal into the shadowy form of the unknowable assailant in the slasher film who is able to intelligently and systematically eliminate defenseless victims under the cover of night. First Blood steps into this milieu, though with a notable twist: the killer here is knowable, a sympathetic and all too human veteran and his “victims” aren’t defenseless teenagers but hapless police officers attempting to carry out their enforcement directives.

A comparison of the First Blood movie poster to that of the quintessential slasher film, 1980’s Friday the 13th, can provide some context for this theory:

Here, in the First Blood poster, high contrast shadows and bold colors, with a penumbra of midnight sky and dark Douglas firs surrounding the icon of Rambo, cast him as a survivor in a fallen world. The spectator views him not merely as a dangerous killer but, more importantly, as a gunman clamoring to survive, one who is up against the odds.

Yet, the difference pictured in the poster nonetheless betrays a striking similarity to another iconic movie poster of the era:

In the case of this earlier slasher movie, we have a pointed contrast with the iconography of the killer from First Blood: the same midnight sky and treelined darkness is located within the outline of the killer, as though all of the fear and terror of the dark and fallen world which Rambo experiences has been relocated into fear and terror of the unknowable killer. His affection for machine guns notwithstanding, the truly iconic weapon of Rambo lore is the hunting knife, to which many closeups in the movies were dedicated, and the reproduction of the bloodied knife of Friday the 13th here is more than simply incidental. Rambo repurposes the weapon of choice in the slasher movie as a defense mechanism for the traumatized individual, yet this is only possible through the projection of the threat onto a third party: our sympathies lie with a single man, Rambo, as a matter of self-defense against the dark collective, whereas, in the traditional slasher film, the spectator becomes identified with the collective under the duress of a single maniac upon whom all of the spectator’s anxieties are projected.

This inversion of the terms of the slasher movie on the part of First Blood is supported by the elasticity of Rambo’s humanity which occurs as we see him carry out his improbable self-defense: his capacity for maximal and seemingly effortless reprisal against a foe who outnumbers him 100 to 1 vitiates the spectator’s earlier identification with his plight, since now he appears to be more machine than man and therefore more deserving of the “slasher” archetype. Indeed, it is with the introduction of Colonel Trautman (Richard Crenna) as the Doctor Frankenstein-like “creator” of Rambo’s superhuman ingenuity that the dehumanization of the Rambo character comes into focus, and, with that, one of the most important metonyms in the franchise, his stand-in for the technological rationalization of the US military-industrial complex. The extemporaneous manipulations of forest materials which Rambo uses to create booby traps for the officers hunting him down are impossibly constructed within the span of minutes, subverting the human subjectivity laid out in the beginning of the film to reveal something more phenomenal, a killing machine. Much like the later Robocop, a highly characteristic film of the 1980s, Rambo’s capacity to perform outlandish feats of physicality serves as an example of the growing ascendancy of military technology in the 1980s, a result of Reagan’s “peace through strength” acceleration of military budget increases during the final years of the Cold War. The capacity to absorb the humanity of both the warrior (Rambo) and the law enforcer (Robocop) alike is highlighted here as a specific trope within the larger preoccupation with military technology.

In fact, the distinction between the archetypes of the warrior and the law enforcer is itself a critical component of First Blood’s rhetorical contribution to political economic matters in the ‘80s. Yet, this distinction is not exactly straightforwardly presented. The movie fuses motifs from different genres and does not present the combination in an organic way. There is the motif of the slasher, as already mentioned, but there is also that of the veteran and the rebel, the member of the warrior class and the individual “speaking truth to power,” and the way these elements are juxtaposed is not obvious, though nonetheless critical to the propaganda of the franchise. Thus, to really get at the messaging underneath the Rambo myth, and especially here in the first installment, requires some critical thinking in order to figure out the real message.

At first, the movie appears to traffic in what by then had become a commonly deployed motif in American cinema, the confrontation between freedom and order personified in the hippie and the police officer respectively. With his long hair and army jacket, the legacy of the counterculture is plainly visible in Rambo’s presentation. The important aspect of diversity is hinted at as well in the casting of Sylvester Stallone, who at that point in his career was a representative of the success story of Italian-American immigration and assimilation.

In presenting Rambo as a monosyllabic stoic, the frontier aesthetic of the American cowboy is reproduced, yet, rather than as a sign of steely determination in the face of the implacable West, it signals noncooperation with authoritarianism. When he defies the edict laid out by the police to never return to the town, it is presented as the kind of defiance and “speaking to power” that defined the Vietnam era protest movement. Indeed, the charge is vagrancy, a crime which, in its nationwide presentation as hippie decadence, held particular resonance in the debate over the expansion of bourgeois freedom implicit in the counterculture.

Yet, this alone leaves First Blood in an awkward and potentially incoherent place. A simple reduction of the confrontation between Rambo and the police to a critique of law and order is insufficient here. John Rambo is an actual serviceman, not a draft-dodging hippie, who, though he defies the rule of law, nonetheless confronts the insensitivity of local police to wartime sacrifice. The betrayal of veterans was at the time a much discussed topic, with important discussion of the role of society with respect to its warrior class. So, it is unclear at first whether the movie wishes to emphasize the bourgeois right of the pursuit of happiness or place more importance with the reactionary grievance of the betrayal of veterans, two strikingly different aspects of civil life with which the movie does not at first seem preoccupied in disentangling.

If Rambo is understood strictly as a societal rogue, in other words, as a hippie, then his conflict with the police may be understood as a species of the sort of conflict spectators witnessed in Easy Rider, namely, the fatal encounter between the characters played by Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper on one side and southern law enforcement on the other. Easy Rider essentially invented this type of litmus test on bourgeois freedom produced by the counterculture and there are aspects of Rambo’s encounter with the police in First Blood that appear to reproduce this litmus test.

But if Rambo is better understood as a traduced veteran, then his conflict with the police seems to illustrate, not a confrontation between freedom and order, but rather a confrontation between two other civic virtues in tension, the homeostasis of the lifeworld and the valorization of military sacrifice. From the standpoint of the police, Rambo threatens the delicate and uneasy peace of the lifeworld achieved in the wake of the antiwar convulsions of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s (recall that the Vietnam War was the spark of the fire of political polarization, a blaze which a half-century later has yet to be put out). In First Blood, the police protect this uneasy peace instead of honoring the sacrifice of soldiers who they see as expendable reminders of a violent past. From the standpoint of John Rambo, however, he is being thrown under the bus merely for existing as nothing other than what he is, a valiant warrior who sacrificed everything for his country. In portraying the police department as headed by a fragile and narcissistic sheriff (Brian Dennehy), First Blood presents an illustration of the hypocrisy and bureaucratization which favors men like Sheriff Teasle and which led to the betrayal of American servicemen.

The problem is that Rambo can’t be a free bourgeois subject challenging the state, that is, he can’t only be one: this would ignore the fact of Rambo’s status as a veteran. He may look and feel like a child of the counterculture, but the hippies given birth by that era were typically not veterans. In fact, they were the opposite, bra-burners and draft-dodgers. So it appears that perhaps John Rambo is foisted in the movie as a victim, not of police brutality, but of social hypocrisy. Yet, because First Blood spends the entire time pitting its lonely hero against the long arm of the law, this critique of veteran betrayal is compromised. There are actors in civil society better suited than the police to dramatize the extent to which veterans were betrayed. In this way, First Blood appears to present a confusing diagram of conflict between two compatible components of the Bonapartist state, law enforcement and the military apparatus: police officers, as subalterns within the Bonapartist state, did not typically participate in the critique of power and imperialism that led to the ambivalences within civil society which at times encouraged the prevalence of veteran betrayal.

First Blood threads this complicated needle of two incompatibilities by presenting the conflict between John Rambo and the Hope Township Police Department, a conflict between federal military might and local law enforcement, not as a fight between a free individual and a reactionary collective, nor as one between a victim of betrayal and an unfeeling bureaucracy, but rather as something a little more subtle, yet critical for its illustration of 1980s political economy. The conflict between Rambo and the police in First Blood is essentially an intra-sector dispute within the Bonapartist dispensation of the modern capitalist order. The movie seeks to demonstrate a resolution to the problem of hierarchy within the monopoly of the use of force that defines the Bonapartist state: local law enforcement is domesticated by the leviathan of the American military. The gatekeeping function of local law enforcement which seeks to assure the bourgeois public of its security is called into question by the introduction of technological firepower, personified by Rambo, on the part of the American government. It is an indication to civil society as to where and how it should place its trust in its petty-bourgeois anxiety about law and order: local law enforcement is portrayed as corrupt, motivated by personal ambition and incompetent, whereas the military, allegorized in the superhuman feats of Rambo, is portrayed as effortlessly supplanting the best designs of the police officers. The Bonapartist turn which bourgeois freedom took in late 19th century capitalism is here formulated as a reminder as to who are the real architects of the American security state: cops cannot guard your freedom against domestic enemies unless they are visibly humbled by the agents who guard your freedom against foreign ones, the movie says. By this reading, First Blood illustrates the growing preoccupation in the waning years of the Cold War with American military strength as its global hegemony, a direct result of the economic crisis in the Soviet Union, entered more and more into view.

One of First Blood’s innovations is the sublation of the guises of difference—in Rambo’s presentation as immigrant and hippie—under the archetype of the wounded warrior. It is the wound which enables this incorporation of the otherness of the immigrant along with the “treehugger”: the traumas of war, as with migration from another land and the altered states from LSD, are one of the legitimate pathways to gaining the status of outsider within bourgeois society. It is perhaps the stain of wartime trauma which Sheriff Teasle sees as the vagrant threat when he enjoins Rambo to leave the town of Hope. The sheriff wishes to cordon off the town from revisitations of Vietnam War-era convulsions, both pro and contra the war. The world has moved on, peace has been restored and the town wishes no relitigation. (The fusion with the specter of otherness was perhaps more acute in the original novel from 1972, which saw Rambo’s itinerant path in the small town of Madison, Kentucky: Appalachia serves as a more potent reminder of the Jim Crow Era than the fictional town of Hope, Washington).

This ambiguity as to the legacy of the Vietnam War gives First Blood a measure of sophistication. Another kind of otherness, the otherness of the wounded warrior, and not the one established by the counterculture, is deployed. Yet, the ultimate meaning, upon whose foundation Rambo’s refusal to comply is situated, is clear: it is not Rambo’s status as beneficiary of bourgeois freedom which lends righteousness to his break with the social contract established by Sheriff Teasle, but rather his status as a sophisticated military bioweapon. The bourgeois freedoms within civil society being protected by Teasle are depicted as relying tenuously on the personal motivations of provincial authority. In fact, the social contract which Rambo breaks evaporates easily and within seconds simply when Rambo decides to defy. Revealing the corruption underlying the police in Hope and therefore, in order to restore order, the subsequent unleashing of federal military might, First Blood presents a sequence of statist domination over civil society, the essence of the Bonapartist state, the overriding directive of homeland security. Rambo’s subsequent chaotic turning of the town upside down is a return to the “forever war” of prehistory, when procrustean competition defined the lifeworld of humanity. A reminder as to human origins, always the justification for the statist turn in bourgeois society, here serves as a cautionary tale for critics of military might. The chaos that ensues cannot be accounted for as the result of individuated subjectivity, whether as the rejection of authority by the counterculture or as the refusal to cooperate with the attempt to forget the veterans. Neither of those resonate with the way that Rambo turns the town upside down (although this is a further resonance of the slasher archetype). Rather, the chaos is a kind of chthonic instantiation of power that is regressive and primitive. His rebellion and the destruction that ensues are Hobbesian, not Rousseauean.

Indeed, it is only in the tragic finale when that humanity, glimpsed at the beginning of the movie, becomes visible again, though only through a dialectic of power that sacrifices Rambo’s humanity for the preservation of Hobbesian law and order. The techno-military machine that emasculates local law enforcement in the name of reinforcing the Bonapartist dialectic of homeland defense over the defense of civil society, personified by Rambo, is, now instead personified by Trautman, who is positioned to reject the rebirth of the human in Rambo’s final cathartic breakdown during which he renounces the wartime directive and reconstitutes his humanity: Rambo performs an ego death through a pained descent into the memory of trying to help his maimed platoon mate during the war and Colonel Trautman looks upon him in silence, immobile and stoic, as unshakeable as Rambo was throughout the movie, during this reenactment of the sylvatic trauma he experienced during the war. The humanity which is extracted from the military apparatus that was the Rambo who spectators witnessed during the film is then expedited into the arms of local law enforcement. Yet, it is not the killing machine which the police of the town of Hope have now finally apprehended but rather this new human being, birthed in the wake of an intrapsychic battle which produces a humanity that is then immediately sacrificed in the name of law and order. The movie portrays Trautman’s rejection as ambivalent: we are not certain if his silence is a quiet holding of space or a “do not cross” sign. Yet, the tragic outcome is the same: Rambo pays dearly to recover his humanity and to awake from his possession by the forces of military technological rationalization. His break with the social contract must be compensated. But the war machine continues.

RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD II

First Blood shares with its war drama precursor The Deer Hunter from the ‘70s, albeit only to a minimal degree, the preoccupation with the shattering of class compromise. In the latter, the horrors of war are juxtaposed with the downward trajectory of the working class coming as a result of the then burgeoning, and soon to be dominant, neoliberal era. Meaningless wars built on arcane security directives are associated with the decline of industrial policy and the uprooting of working class life.

Yet, First Blood immediately renounces a straightforward interrogation of this dynamic of the sort which The Deer Hunter embraces. Instead, it reconstitutes the shattering of class compromise, not as the tragic sacrifice of vulnerable young men in the name of the war machine, but as an entrepreneurial battle for individualized human subjectivity against the imperatives of military technological rationalization. It utilizes new cultural forms coming into view in the early ‘80s, such as the slasher film, to bolster this narrative. The discovery of psychological substance on the part of John Rambo reflects the growing emphasis on individual consumption, as opposed to collective production, of early neoliberalism, even as it is depicted as a tragic occurrence, a woeful outcome of the dominance of the war machine. The importance of military dominance abroad—the expanding technological basis of which itself is a critical aspect of the neoliberal era—is presented as an ultimatum to civil society that not only sacrifices industrial policy, but also reduces the opposition to hapless players in a violent Hobbesian natural order.

In this way, First Blood presents a slightly ambiguous appraisal of the by-then fully sublated antiwar convulsions of the counterculture, for it simultaneously constitutes the prevalence of the security state while emphasizing the costs to human wellbeing. It assumes that working class collectivity has withered in the face of neoliberalism, and does not shy away from presenting the dissolution of class compromise as tragedy, but makes no attempt, as The Deer Hunter does, to mourn the loss and investigate the results. It avoids contemplating a discernible program for dealing with the impact on human thriving that such a loss implies. Ultimately, it is a pessimistic portrayal of the American soldier’s, along with the average American’s, capacity to adapt to dehumanizing developments coming from the birth of neoliberalism, of which the likewise dehumanizing modern practice of warfare, a reflection of the Bonapartist state’s “protection racket” of the capitalist economy, is a necessary outgrowth.

No such tragic ambivalence, however, may be detected in the sequel to First Blood, the blockbuster action-adventure film Rambo: First Blood II. In it, the war machine that was allegorized in the exploits of John Rambo—and that was ostensibly calcined away in the final moments of the film through the heat of traumatic recall that then gives birth to the authentic human of John Rambo—is here resurrected as an unambiguously reified call of duty. The Dr. Frankenstein in Colonel Trautwell, rather than leave his creation be to carry out his debt to society in the quarries of penal labor, instead returns to reawaken the military machine. The debt which Rambo is paying becomes pointless in the face of what Trautwell offers, a full pardon in exchange for the resurrection. A new cosmology thereby is given shape: in this universe of homeland defense, John Rambo’s destiny is to join a demiurgic warrior class, not to partake of vulgar societal transactionism carried out as recompense for previous “infractions.” The latter is for the merely human, a tragic and pessimistic status which is given to Rambo at the end of First Blood, and which the Rambo franchise as a whole is from this point forward very eager to overcome. (Echoes of the myth of Christ reverberate in this “salvation” of a demigod from undergoing the fate of the “merely” human: the makers of the movie seem to be aware of this resonance as the Rambo character is portrayed assuming the Christlike pose in the middle of the film, when he is raised up from a sewage bath tied to ropes on each wrist, mortified and “crucified”).

What follows is not the nuanced interplay between allegories of power which we saw in Rambo’s conflict with local police officers. Nor is it the anatomy of a process of individuation though encounter with original trauma which we saw in Rambo’s intrapsychic struggle. Rather, it is a complete reification of military industrial might in the reconstituted bioweaponry of Rambo’s superhuman capacities. The sequel to First Blood is, in this sense, a much more optimistic case for the military industrial complex through a much more anthropomorphic depiction of military rationalization than its predecessor: Rambo as demiurge is reconstituted as a cipher of human morality and that morality is explicitly grounded in a prescription for civil society. The “humanity” which is professed in the person of Rambo, whose sole directive in the movie is the rescue of POWs, is that of the concerned citizen. The movie seems to aver that to be human is categorically identical to the search for the good and, in a nationalistic universe that establishes homeland defense as the ultimate signifier of national pride, the good clearly must entail the sacrosanctity of the armed forces. Anything short of that, the movie seems to say, is inhuman.

As in First Blood, the cinematography in Rambo: First Blood II plays an important role in encoding the intended messaging. Whereas in the original deep colors and photorealism cast Rambo in the milieu of a recognizably human world, the shiny, gauzy, beige cast of the sequel renders Rambo as a more ethereal character. In the first film, the deep forest of Washington State is recalled in a potent chiaroscuro of green and umber, but, in the second, the jungles of Vietnam do not receive a similarly trenchant exposure. The natural world is instead portrayed as unearthly, blurry, full of shimmers, overexposures and glints from overblown lens effects on the cameras, grounding the violence, action and plotting of Rambo’s journey in a kind of afterlife realm. Indeed, the love interest’s last words to Rambo before her untimely shooting is a request to be taken to Rambo’s “home world” with him when his mission is over. The lack of depth in the photography clearly denotes a displacement from setting that is crucial for the makers of the franchise in establishing once and for all Rambo’s mythical status. By this point, he is no longer a fallible human, as the first movie intended to conclude, but a reified archetype existing in a fantasy.

Indeed, as an example of cinema, it is beyond clear that First Blood, taken solely at face value, is the superior movie. There is no attempt here to debate that. Yet, that is not particularly important for this exploration: we are not focussing on cinematic critique but on the propagandistic value for the development of neoliberalism that is imprinted on the Rambo franchise. That process begins with the first film and ineluctably leads to the second. The tragic outcome of First Blood can be seen as a residual politics of the antiwar era of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. Indeed, the First Blood novel was published in 1972, immediately in the wake of the late ‘60s convulsions and before the Vietnam War had even been officially concluded. Yet, this residue from the ‘60s is nonetheless faint and other screeds, such as the “magical realism” of superhuman physicality in the service of celebrating military rationalization, begin to take shape. This is the beginnings of the neoliberal era, when victory in the Cold War was within sight and free trade began to globalize international relations. The tension between those two eras is subtly indicated in the first Rambo movie. Yet, by the time of the 1985 sequel, all such preoccupations have been concluded and, in the wake of the reelection of Reagan, we are left with victorious neoliberalism and the pure formula of Rambo’s warrior ethos. The fact that First Blood is a much better film is not particularly relevant to acknowledging this development.

In fact, looking back to the First Blood movie poster reveals the creeping sense of compatibility and coherence to the franchise’s overall effort to assimilate to trends in consumption of mass entertainment, no matter the first film’s claim as a “serious” movie. The lead actor’s surname is printed in a larger font than the title of the movie, which indicates that the focus here is on branding as opposed to story. Under the surname is a curious slogan, “This time he’s fighting for his life.” Obviously, the intended connection is to the Rocky franchise: it is not Rambo who is doing the fighting but the actor performing the role, the A-list celebrity known as Sylvester Stallone, since it was that same actor who, prior to First Blood, was “fighting,” though not “for his life,” but for other objectives related to the Rocky story world, which, at that point, had already released three movies. In referencing the events occurring in a separate narrative universe, the movie poster is clearly sublating the narrative structure of First Blood as an appropriated property of the Hollywood star’s career. Already in the first film, regardless of any designs toward “legitimate” cinema, the franchise potential of the Rambo story and its relegation as the mere text of mediatic postmodern idolization, is in view.

It is no accident, then, that the sequel was not titled “First Blood II: Rambo,” but the reverse. The makers were well-aware that, whatever narrative structure to which the first movie gave careful attention, the focus of the franchise will from this point forward be on the extracted figurehead of the story, not the narrative premise of the original. Action figures, as miniature idols of Hollywood branding, can not be created to represent humanistic portrayals, but rather mythical ones. There is a popular meme online that juxtaposes John Rambo’s nervous breakdown and show of vulnerability in the first movie with the subsequent extravagant and sensationalistic TV advertising of Rambo toys: it is a modern distillation of the awkward tension between narrative work and mediatic text which the developers of the franchise were eager to resolve in the second film.

This resolution in the second film, the abolition of Rambo’s antiheroic relevance in favor of the establishment of reified heroism, presents a new frontier in the Rambo franchise’s connection with the progress of neoliberalism. In keeping with the imminent conclusion of the Cold War which Reagan helped set in motion, the sequel turns the focus of the franchise abroad, to the explicit prerogative of homeland defense on the part of the military. Having risen out of the Volcker Shock in the early ‘80s and accelerated the ongoing dismantling of domestic industrial production, the issue of United States political economy had been put to rest, leaving space to focus on foreign threats. Rambo’s dispute in the first film, along with its relevance to civil society, is reconstituted as the settling of scores between great power rivals on the global stage. This expansion of Rambo’s remit reflects how, by 1985, the Soviet Union and its communist alternative to American capitalism had become a popular fixation as a result of the globalizing impact of a neoliberalism that had evolved considerably since the first film. The march toward America’s full global hegemony had arrived by the mid ‘80s to one of its final stages. To shore up consent for this heightened confrontationalism in foreign policy, Rambo’s human subjectivity as an ambiguous quantum on a spectrum between good and bad would need to be stabilized so that he might carry out justice abroad in the most efficient manner: the human would now be identified with a moral imperative. A superhero franchise was given birth.

The shift from realism to fantasy over the course of the first two Rambo films is detectable in the different registers in which the humanness of heroes and villains are sometimes portrayed. In this way, the contrast is similar to the contrast between traditional depictions of the DC Comics villain The Joker and the innovative humanized portrait of Todd Phillips’s first Joker movie. Rambo in the sequel corresponds to the flat characterology of traditional presentations of heroes and villains, while his depiction in the first movie bears more of the sort of preoccupations with psychological realism and individual motivation that we find in Phillips’s Joker. Furthermore, in contrast to the way the police are portrayed in First Blood, as fully constituted humans in a specific lifeworld setting fulfilling the objectives of average yet distinct people, the Vietnamese generals who function as Rambo’s opposition in the sequel are depicted virtually facelessly and interchangeably, reflecting a more pronounced othering of the villain. The Soviet threat conjured in the movie through the presence of the Russian military is likewise flattened, as Rambo’s chief foe, Colonel Podovsky, who tortures him after capture, is depicted with undefined malice and cartoonish evilness. This is a far cry from Sheriff Teasle in First Blood, whose opposition to Rambo strained from more detectably human motives. Also, the resurrected military machine of the sequel has been retrofitted here to serve more expansive offensive operations: Rambo is now able to singlehandedly dispose of entire enemy squadrons with nothing but an AK-47 and a seemingly infinitely long magazine of bullets. The implausibility of Rambo’s lethal capacity, already a key component of the story in the first film, here receives further distortion of the human experience ostensibly undergirding the exploits within the hero’s journey.

This distortion is a key element for Rambo: First Blood II’s rhetorical emphasis. The bending of the laws of the physical universe serves a metonymic function for American exceptionalism, an important creedal component of evolving neoliberalism. The vanquishing of the Soviet threat, something without which neoliberalism’s expansion on the global stage would always be stalled, required the moralization of American self-interest and the best way to establish this morality for neoliberalism is to demonstrate technological rationalization on a scale that can bend physical phenomena to the personal will. Localizing this capacity into the vessel of one man is also key to the consolidation of consent to neoliberalism’s global designs: the moral imperative of military industrial might is safely embodied in the transparent moralism of one man saving the lives of imprisoned soldiers abroad.

This brings us to the main crux of the sequel, the confrontation between unfettered military might and an unfeeling bureaucracy that would restrain the righteousness of such natural power. This crux also presents us with a dilemma: what is the spectator to make of Rambo’s contempt of the technocratic encroachment on the American military, personified in the figure of Marshall Roger Murdock (Charles Napier), the bureaucrat in charge of overseeing ongoing US military presence headquartered in Thailand? If Rambo represents the military’s full capacity for technological rationality, what then is the nature of his conflict with the ostensible variant of technological rationality plainly evident in Murdock’s state-of-the-art command center?

A dialectical approach will loosen the snag of antinomy and reveal the hidden compatibility of these two seemingly polarized opposites. For the presentation of conflict between the valiant humanism of Rambo’s defense of human capital and the instrumentalized relativism of Murdock’s defense of technocratic efficiency is actually a means by which to distract focus on the growing contradictions of modern warfare in neoliberalism through the performance of conflict between two sides that are actually in concordance.

When Rambo confronts Murdock in a fit of rage, the bureaucrat’s immediate defense is to say that he was just carrying out orders, an explicit reference to the famous defense of Nazi war criminals during the Nuremberg Trials. The legacy of Nuremberg is evident in the sequel through the presence of the Vietnamese concentration camp housing POWs and with the abandonment of human capital by the depersonalized bureaucratic wrangling of the modernized military machine represented by Murdock: these are portrayed as unequivocally evil and, vis a vis Nuremberg, rightfully contemptible under the ICC. This contemptibility bolsters Rambo’s bid for moral authority: in the face of the barbarity, one man is able to marshal the moral clarity of right action. He then defies his directive, rescues the POWs and, in a hail of bullets, destroys the technological edifice of computerized surveillance in Murdock’s compound. He thereby enacts a moral restoration, one that refuses to sacrifice human life for the purpose of technocratic rationalism. He carries out the humanistic declaration, prevalent since the Enlightenment, that all men are created equal. The men who supervise the machine, such as Murdock and his Nazi precursors at Nuremberg, can not appeal to the “superior defense”: under bourgeois right, humans are necessarily free and may never renounce that freedom, no matter how “rational” their defense. The freedom to choose right action is binding under all circumstances and Rambo, as the destroyer of alienated technocratic bureaucracy, represents this bond.

Yet, the movie seeks not to distinguish military might, represented by Rambo, and technological efficiency, represented by Murdock, but to bring them into concordance, which it makes official through the imposition of a final compact with the bureaucrat. Murdock is to insure that any remaining POWs are all returned home on pain of execution by Rambo. Through this compact, the sequel endeavors to grant technological rationality a human face. The supplanting of the bureaucracy brought about by this new compact is ostensibly meant, not to achieve a new order, but to consolidate the old one. Throughout the movie, Rambo’s superhuman capacities were presented as a defense of the righteousness of the natural order. In the face of alienated technological warfare, humans confront a rationalization lacking the justice of the natural world. Rambo, as the personification of the natural order, is therefore presented as a reminder to the spectator that, in fact, there is another kind of machine, one that is anthropomorphized as a “natural machine,” equipped with all of the same benefits of the older one, yet with the additional necessary faculty of moral rightness which the technologically advanced one lacks. The anthropomorphized machine of Rambo is, through his humanity, able to call balls and strikes, whereas the computer, because of the absence of any personal will, cannot. In presenting this moral accounting as the display of superhuman capacities which break with credulity, the sequel foists Rambo’s vanguard humanism as the very military-industrial project itself, the constant search for military dominance. In the case of Rambo, a human turned into a bioweapon, this search for dominance is given human form.

The battle between Rambo and Murdock is therefore a battle between two machines, or rather, between two faces of the same machine. Rambo’s presence is a necessity, since, without him, that is, without the tethering of the technological advancement of the military, the world would descend into a moral quagmire. Since the military machine can not make the kind of moral judgements necessary to make the right call, abominations occur. Therefore, a superhero must be posited. The conflict between Rambo and Murdock is the presentation of an impossible kind of AI, one that is both human and artificial. As such, it is the presentation of a kind of moral restoration in the face of growing anxiety over technological evolution. If First Blood is a pessimistic portrayal of human sacrifice for the war machine, Rambo: First Blood II is a technophobic fever dream that refuses to make any more human sacrifices whatsoever. It presents a fantastical sublation of the war machine through the positing of a superhuman that domesticates it, serving to propagate the directive of continual military advancement by granting it flesh and blood and, inherent in that reification, moral rightness.

The fusion of the natural order with technological rationality is a key supposition for neoconservatism: as the guardian of natural rights, America bestows itself the moral high ground, along with the enforcement apparatus that secures those natural rights. This requires a highly sophisticated war machine in order to occasionally intervene on the world stage through invasions, coups and bombing campaigns. Yet, neoconservatism did not coincide with high neoliberalism by accident: neoliberalism’s open seas and free trade agreements do not fit comfortably with an isolationist foreign policy posture. Rather, a foreign policy that explicitly justifies foreign intervention, such as neoconservatism, is required in order to secure peaceable navigation routes. As an avatar of the inherent rightness of the natural order, the Enlightenment principle that undergirds the expansion of bourgeois freedom under capitalism, Rambo expropriates the depersonalized techno-bureaucratic machine that is necessary for the stabilization of the neoliberal world order as a component of a humanized war machine. This new type of machine presents the exceptionalist dogma of the rightness of foreign intervention, since it is presented as, in essence, human and therefore moral. On the surface, Rambo: First Blood II posits conflict between the human and the technological. But a look inside, rather, reveals between the two not tension, but collaboration.

First Blood presented a case-study of early neoliberalism’s reorientation of working class subjectivity to the subjectivity of the entrepreneurial self: in 1982, during the first term of Ronald Reagan, the new political economic order was in its relative infancy and leftover anxieties from the late-New Deal order needed soothing in the image of a type of superhuman vigilante, a lone gunman representing homeland security who domesticates other factions of the Bonapartist state in order to personally stabilize domestic affairs.

With the second Reagan term by 1985, when Rambo: First Blood II is released, the mandate of the Reagan Revolution is in full swing. Domestic affairs have been consolidated under the regime of newly liberated markets, but the Soviet threat remained, requiring a bellicose posture that also clarified moral standing on the world stage. The imperative of growth which motivates the creation of ever greater capacity for technological efficiency through the years is fused with the bioweaponry of Rambo for the purpose of carrying out justice, not domestically, but on foreign soil. Here he forces the submission, not of another faction of the Bonapartist state, but of the military apparatus itself, through the presentation of the rightness of the natural order.

The caricatures that dominate the spectator’s field of vision in the sequel reflect impatience with moral ambivalence, which is understandable given the heightened stakes of the Cold War. The films of the previous decade were characterized by a healthy preoccupation with moral quandaries and an enthusiasm for meditations on social reality. Traces of this preoccupation are evident in First Blood, but not in the sequel.

The spectator would have to wait until the following decade, after the Cold War had been concluded and neoliberalism rose to victorious heights under the banner of Clintonian liberalism, in order for filmmakers to repossess the space for subtlety and regain the incentive to present nuanced portrayals, though this would largely occur as a phenomenon of the burgeoning independent film industry. Nonetheless, as we shall see in part two of this essay, the Rambo franchise, along with most of the big studio films, would be spared these reacquired preoccupations.

An unsettling—and thankfully, for now, mostly online—narrative has taken hold amidst a highly visible portion of the commentariat claiming that almost every jingoistic impulse on the part of the United States government will, upon cursory inspection, reveal itself to originate as the premeditated intention of the Israeli state.

Folks on the right and the left join in on the chorus of proclaiming that US foreign policy is almost entirely dictated by the whims and wants of Tel-Aviv. “Israel First” has risen as a mocking epithet for any politician claiming that America First guides their principles. AIPAC ratings of Congressmen are floated about as shaming tactics intended to sway public opinion against them. According to these thinkers, many of whom are themselves Jewish, Israel is puppeteering the West into wars that are against its own interests.

“But doesn’t this strike you as very similar to the notorious and age-old conspiracy theory of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion which the Nazis capitalized on in order to carry out their antisemitic genocidal program? I mean, weren’t they all going on and on about Jews and puppets and so forth?,” asked a very reasonable person, only to then be “smeared” with the sobriquet of “zionist scumbag.”

Full disclaimer: I am not someone who believes, as many in fact do, that the distinction between “Jews” and “Israel” is a make-believe one, that if you criticize Israel this ipso facto means you are an antisemite. But that doesn’t change the fact that the current crop of conspiracy theorists do make good use of this distinction, using it to counter accusations of antisemitism with plausible deniability. Everyone knows there’s a difference between Jews and the state of Israel, they say; we speak only of the latter and not of the former.

True enough. But as reasonable and sound is this distinction, nonetheless, a great many pundits proposing this explanation for our inscrutable foreign policy have succumbed to the somewhat predictable lurch into full-blown antisemitism. X is certainly far from faithful in serving as a barometer of public opinion. But the level of antisemitic blathering on that website now is truly stunning.

And it is easy to see that, as with historical antisemitism, it is fueled by a kernel of rationality: anxiety over the inability of our leaders to provide meaningful explanations for overseas action. In lieu of real accounting, the Israel First card is then slapped down on the table. And from that point it’s an express train to the infamous Protocols. Your Tucker Carlsons “just asking questions” inevitably lead to your Nick Fuentes’ fulminating about “international Jewry.” This type of thing has come to include the extreme left as well: not just “rightoids” but “libtards” as well—and many times not realizing that they are doing so—now regularly traffic in antisemitic tropes.

It wasn’t all that long ago when things were different than they are now. Antisemites have always been among we in the West. But there’s been a noticeable increase in tolerance of Jew hatred from the online fringes and it should give us pause as we try to make sense of the disarray coming in the wake of the world changing around us.

About that changed world . . . .

On October 8th, 2023, before one bomb had dropped on Gaza, I tweeted out something that was awkwardly phrased and easily interpretable as morally justifying the attacks of October 7th. Not two hours later, someone to whom I was very close, after reading the tweet, censured me and, still reeling from the atrocity of the previous day, condemned me and unfollowed me. An overreaction? Probably, but the censure had an effect: I later issued an apology thread for the presumed insensitivity of my original tweet. Later on, I regretted sending the apology. I still do, not because I deny the insensitivity of my original tweet: it probably was. I regret it because it wasn’t exactly the right response and very soon after history would make this kind of an apologia a nonstarter anyway.

In the wake of the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, and the tidal shift in public opinion about our relationship with the state of Israel, it was becoming impossible for anyone to really criticize people for condemning a nation that it was once considered déclassé or just taboo to openly condemn. Folks like Meko Peled, the apostate son of a famous IDF general, made the rounds on lefty podcasts calling for the dismantling of the Israeli state. Pro-Palestine protests radiated throughout the body politic and “globalize the intifada” became a byword for national liberatory movements. I remember being shocked watching Palestinian activist Richard Medhurst on his podcast flipping the bird at Israel, with copious use of colorful language to support his gesture. The only type of figure who I’d expected would do such a thing was a white nationalist but now here was this liberal guy doing it. The Overton Window, if we may call it that, was widening to include within “polite society” radical notions like open calls for “regime change” in Israel. Of course, now in 2026, after everything that has progressed since that fateful day, it is no longer shocking to witness such vitriol against Israel. But back then, as all this unfurled, it was unprecedented. All of the shame that I had initially felt in the fallout of the castigation I was given because of my tweet withered away in a self-congratulatory fervor of vindication.

It would be difficult to explain to our pre-October 7th selves just how dramatically the political winds would soon shift, using one’s position with regard to the ethnic cleansing of Gaza as a hinge point for forming unlikely alliances. If you would have told me that soon after that horrible day none other than Medea Benjamin would do a proud photo-op with Marjorie Taylor Greene I would have laughed at you. Yet, that is now the world we live in, where reactionary rightwing populists seemingly lock elbows with anti-imperialist rad lib activists, all under the banner of condemning reflexive American support for Israel. The once fringe notion of horseshoe theory is now a visible and viable symbol for cooperation between otherwise mortal political enemies and serves as a testament to how much the needle has moved with regard to the historically complicated issue of American support for Israel’s military.

Yet, now living on this completely revolutionized political chessboard, it behooves us to reckon with the non-straightforward nature of anti-imperialism itself. Before we get carried away, it will do to remind ourselves that the Nazis were technically anti-imperialist. In the wake of post-10/7 anti-imperialist rhetoric from revolutionary parties in Africa, Slavoj Zizek worried that it seemed we were slipping too readily into the equation of anti-imperialism with antisemitism. Canadian Marxist scholar Moishe Postone called antizionism the “anti-imperialism of fools.” What is meant by this is that the fervor behind calls to uncouple our foreign policy from Israel is based on a misread of the basic structure of Western imperialism in the 21st Century, which is not really an imperialism, at least not in the way the word is historically understood. It is obviously a stretch to call Israel merely an ally. It is more of a client state of ours in the Middle East. But this doesn’t equal imperialism. In a world where imperial structures are occluded by complex financial instruments like sanctions and financial hegemonies like dollarization, the status of Israel is better explained as a matter of geopolitics rather than imperialism.

There is a great, albeit unsexy, explanation for the prominence of the Israeli state within our foreign policy framework. Israel happens to be the most profitable, reliable trading partner in a lucrative, resource-rich, but volatile, region. We aren’t the only ones who love doing business with Israel. Almost all other countries in the world consider Israel to be a desirable global trading hub, along with their neighbors the Saudis and the Emirates. If you think that the United States is going to let go of a key resource partner in a region that has been historically volatile, all because of some pesky idea about human rights, I have a bridge to sell you. If one thing reigns supreme in the world today it is capitalist politics.

Rather than serving as evidence of string-pulling, Israel’s strategic partnership with the US is merely the logical result of very sound geopolitical statecraft. Does this mean that AIPAC has no outsize influence on domestic politics? Of course not. But attributing every good word said about Israel to the impact of the Israel lobby is like saying that we would repeal the 2nd Amendment if only the NRA would get out of the way. The fact is that, given the immigrant success story of American Jews and the long history of absence of a Jewish nation-state, Israel is a natural spiritual lodestar in public consciousness of the US. That isn’t a conspiracy theory: it’s just a non-dramatic outcome of a set of uncontroversial geo-historical factors.

Does this mean we should abandon Palestinians? Of course not. The Occupied Territories must be liberated. We need a solution. Moreover, for the good of America, for the good of American Jews, Arab-Americans and American Muslims, we desperately need a solution to this problem. If we had a one-state solution would that pose problems to the elite class that relies on Israeli stability to do its business? Sure. Does that explain the difficulty in getting to a one-state solution? Sure. But that isn’t some Israeli cabal. It’s a capitalist cabal. It’s not even a cabal because cabals happen behind closed doors and all of this is right there out in the open for all to see.

But a lot of people don’t see. And this is where the problem of antisemitism has once again reared its ugly head in the online world. Rather than take at face value all of the contradictions plainly laid out by the capitalist class for all the world to see, instead, we turn our eyes and believe in ghosts. The fact of the matter is that what is most horrifying about capitalism is not its ability to occlude, but its sheer scope, the sense that it will just keep churning no matter what anyone does and that we might never have a solution to the problem of human freedom, no matter how visible is the horror of that failure to find a solution. And in order to cope with this intractable problem, we invent bogeymen. Islamophobia, a specific variant of xenophobia, is one such bogeyman. Antisemitism, a unique kind of bigotry, is yet another. In their book Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno diagnose antisemitism as issuing from a similar strain of hatred to the one that gives birth to misogyny, that in the face of the Jew, as in that of the woman, the rulers see the visage of something they consider to be utterly despicable, the image of a person who does not have embedded in their psyche the experience of domination, that they do not know what it is to rule. The slide into overt antisemitism that we are seeing amongst many who wish to ascribe such totalizing and nefarious agency to the state of Israel is difficult to explain without this “express lane” of hatred that comes from the specific socio-historical circumstances of Western Jewry.

Indeed, without such facile explanations of Israeli string-pulling, we are left with the horrifying conclusion that the ethnic cleansing of Gaza we have witnessed over the last three years really did just happen because the world is working exactly in the way that it looks like it’s working, that indeed the ruling class is just standing by as innocent children lie dead under the rubble, that the lives of Palestinians are being sacrificed, not because of some hidden plot, but rather for the much more self-contradictory reason that, though we know our freedom, we are nonetheless powerless to stop the inevitable and cruel churn of global capitalism.

This isn’t a call to arms for Israel. Far be it from me to call for allegiance to a nation-state. I throw my lot in with the international working class, wherever they are, whatever ethnicity they are and whatever creed they uphold. As far as I am concerned, everything else is capitalist politics. I believe that, on a deep philosophical level, there is no material difference between “From the River to the Sea” and “Israel Has a Right to Exist.” As formulations of the sovereignty of the nation-state, both are emanations of bourgeois right. But you don’t have to be a Marxist like me in order to nonetheless perform the basic and perfectly reasonable upholding of both the rightness of Israel’s existence and the righteousness of Palestinian liberation. The Jews need a home state and the Palestinians need their own country. Some point to a two-state solution, others to a one-state. But whatever the solution shall be, here in the West, in between that morning latte and the late brunch, you don’t need to call for the destruction of the other in order to uphold the righteousness of the one. Go out with your Israeli flag. Just check that Islamophobia. Go out with your Palestinian flag. Just check that antisemitism.

As we turn our attention farther east to Persia, it is important for us to remember this lesson about agency. There are very good reasons for this bombing campaign. When I say “good” I don’t mean “morally correct.” If we were to judge the initiation of Operation Epic Fury on its moral merits it would count as a horrifying atrocity, just as the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians was and continues to be a horrifying atrocity. No, what I mean when I say that there are “good reasons” is merely that, from a geopolitical perspective, this is no “madness” except the madness of capitalism, which is a madness that, though it destroys, it also creates. What is being “created” here, only time will tell. But it’s up to us to make sure we understand what is happening with as clear of an eye as possible. Does this mean I support Operation Epic Fury? Absolutely not. I stand with all my fellow peaceniks in condemning this unprovoked attack.

But I will not resort to the ascription of secret activity on the part of some subterranean plot to explain why we are doing this. We are dropping bombs on Iran not because some client state of ours with whom we have a perfectly reasonable strategic partnership “wants” us to drop bombs on Iran. We are dropping bombs on Iran because we want to drop bombs on Iran, and when I say “we” I mean only the ruling class. I don’t count in the “we,” nor should you. The point is that no one is doing Israel’s “bidding.” And we would do well to examine how close to antisemitism efforts to ascribe such outsize agency to a Jewish client state bring us.

Let that sink in: we bomb people because we want to bomb people. Moreover, we bomb people because we need to bomb people. The world is turning on the axial manifold of capitalist production and the machine needs bodies. The horror is that we have freely created this system. We have done so because, thanks to the Enlightenment, the Jacobins and the Founding Fathers, we today are free.

That means that we are also free to stop it, though we have not yet discovered how to carry out that next project of freedom. Until we start figuring that part out, it will have to do to accept the kind of horror that no antisemitic conspiracy theory, no childish image of hidden reptiles, can ever outdo.

I experienced a curious feeling of remorse while watching President Trump give his sprawling, brazen and decadent State of the Union address last night. Given the litany of the expectedly bigoted talking points about murderers, rapists and men in dresses, given the disgusting and overt sycophancy of the MAGA hopefuls in the audience, given the outlandish cavalcade of unlikely war heroes and supposed role models of virtue and decency trotted out to receive yet another medal, I naturally came to an interesting crossroads: am I taking my criticism of the Democrats maybe a little too far? After all, given the grotesquerie on display at this main event, is it really the case that the other side does constitute the equally profound descent into unfree capitalist rule which I continually accuse it of and that this Republican side much more obviously constitutes?

So, I went and had a gander at what the Democrats were all up to. They had organized a counter-programming-cum-SOTU-boycott event titled “State of the Swamp” put together by the newly-minted “Defiance.org” club which held their inaugural gathering at the National Press Club and featured a now notorious welcoming easel outside the event space (X user “Enguerrand VII de Coucy” commented on it with a rather descriptive caption: “All the excitement of a minor chemical engineering conference held at the Dubuque airport Marriott”) along with a lineup of unspecified representatives dressed up in frog costumes, the apparently self-described “Portland Frog Brigade.”

The tragedy of this “attempt” at effective counter-programming made it impossible for me to return to my previous and brief openness to the virtues of voting Democrat. Apparently, there is no grotesquerie that the Republicans can install in front of national broadcasting cameras that can not be matched with equal grotesqueness by the Democrats.

We are a far cry from the days when our leaders would make sure they’d brushed their teeth before they left the house. Now, such formalities are deemed inexpedient. Better to run out of the house in a gyre of panic and clutch at a momentary notion of virality in the hopes of gaining traction with a voter base that is increasingly seen as nothing but a consumer one. This goes for the main event as well, where now the structural integrity of what was once seen as a contiguous speech with important policy configurations is cannibalized for the algorithms of social media and turned into a sequenced tableau of discreet chunks composed more with the online clip universe in mind than any overall thinking-person’s persuasion.

I will say that I laughed out loud several times. One of the bright spots of the postmodern absurdity that is the Trump presidency is just how funny the guy is. The SOTU speech last night did not disappoint in this regard. Journalist Michael Tracey, himself no stranger to the jocular, tweeted the following demonstrative quote from the speech:

Our country is winning again, in fact we're winning so much that we really don't know what to do about it. People are asking me, please please please Mister President, we're winning too much. We can't take it anymore, we're not used to winning in our country. Until you came along, we're just always losing, but now we're winning too much. And I say no no no, you're going to win again. You're going to win big. You're gonna win bigger than ever.

Tracey included a characteristically sardonic comment after the quote: “An amazing piece of oratory. Brought a tear to my eye.”

I gotta say though, that X user “Red Ketchup” who commented on this tweet of Tracey’s had a somewhat better take:

You have to give him credit though for inventing a genre of speech/writing that is INSTANTLY recognizable to ONE PERSON on the planet. It's amazing. Never been done before. People ask him all the time Don, how do you do it? And he tells them. He has words, the best words.

Red Ketchup’s foray into memesis aside, the point is well-taken: Trump has essentially invented a manner of expression. But, like so much of what Trump offers to the American public, it is merely expression. More often than not, and certainly last night’s SOTU address was no exception, there is little substance underneath.

But it’s still possible to trawl through the muck and get at something one can hang one’s hat on. Interestingly, this year that came in the form of the Democratic Party State of the Union response presented by Abigail Spanberger, the former CIA case officer and consulting firm representative who went on to stock the ranks of elected female hopefuls in Congress during that first midterm rebuke of Trump’s first term that brought us the Squad among others in 2017. Last year she won the Virginia gubernatorial race. I’m not a betting man, but I think I’d place a significant wager on Polymarket that Spanberger’s careful mix of technocratic law-and-order messaging and Clintonian centrist bread-and-butter economics is going to be the new face of the Democratic Party when it wins the next presidential election.

In true Bonapartist fashion, Spanberger presents to the public the identity of a better, more effective and more humane police officer. Balance, reason and steadiness, the longtime hallmarks of the centrist brand, are now being deployed in the service of the maintenance of the security state fortification which Trump has been accelerating over the course of his two terms. Why vote for a reckless cop who ends up killing innocents through its incompetence when you can get the best of both worlds, a cop who kills only the criminals? Abandoning the bureaucratization of the social welfare state for the bureaucratization of the security state is a logical next step in the evolution of monopoly capitalism as the ever diminishing rate of capital accumulation requires the sacrifice of state largesse in favor of administrative control. Governor Spanberger is the next avatar in the procession of capitalism eating itself: she is the “sensible” police officer who will provide the exact same services to the community which the current “insensible” one does, only with greater care in PR.

The off the wall rhetoric of the Trumpian populist era is coming to a close. Even the wildest binges in Vegas eventually need to wind down before there’s an OD or an arrest. No one can party indefinitely. When Trump is out of office the populace will wake up out of the fugue state he has put us all in since 2015 and which, if his SOTU address is anything to go by, he is still more than capable of keeping us situated in until he decides to let us go. When that happens there will be a great reckoning with all that this Shiva-like “destroyer of worlds” has wrought. There is no going back. And we will all be very tired indeed.

Capitalism is perhaps the only historical force that has ever existed that can create out of its own destruction, that fully constitutes that Hindu trinity of Brahma-Vishnu-Shiva. The Brahma-like creation coming out of Trumpian destruction will be, Vishnu-like, maintained, by capitalism, in its newly enshrined form in three years when the electorate goes back to the polls to pull the lever for the next POTUS. Personally, I don’t think it’s going to be Vance: we’re going to be too tired and I don’t think it’s going to be possible for someone so closely associated with Shiva to gain the electorate’s trust. It’s going to be Spanberger, or a Democrat just like her. Capitalism always and assuredly requires a Bonapartist facelift in order to maintain its system integrity. We’ll be more than about due for a touchup come 2028.

It might seem from reading the above thread on X that the parties involved are in sharp conflict with each other but they actually have more in common than they disagree with each other. What they have in common is their total incapacity to cope with the fact that neoliberalism, the economic global order that has dominated international relations since Nixon, is decidedly in the rearview mirror. Lots of evidence to support the view that neoliberalism is over! Mark Carney’s infamous Davos speech. Brexit. The election of Donald Trump. Hungary/Slovakia Ukraine skepticism. The acquisition of Greenland. Aggressive war footing with Iran. Tariffs. Industrial policy. Another one: the topic of the imminent destruction of the Cuban regime by means of aggressive economic sanctions. It has been reaching greater pitch these days due to the Trump administration’s severe policy with regard to certain countries below the US’s southern border. The Maduro capture seems now to have been the mere first act of this two-hander, with the potential fall of Cuba serving as the crucial second act. Many heads are weighing in, as in the above screenshot which came to my attention randomly the other day. It serves as an example of how impoverished most of our public discussion is on foreign policy. Didn’t we all read The Prince in college or was that just me?

Let’s start with Camila Cabello’s inciting incident. The Cuban-Mexican-American singer is guilty of probably the greatest ignorance of the neoliberal era, the belief that sanctions regimes, economic embargoes and blockades have no impact whatsoever on the wellbeing of the citizens of the countries affected by these measures. This amounts to something like blaming the victim: you see someone suffering and you assume it’s their fault. “They cosigned Fidelismo and now they’re merely experiencing the logical outcome of living under a dictatorship: mass starvation, infrastructure breakdown, etc.” The poor bastards. If only they hadn’t gotten so excited about the revolution all those decades ago, about popular sovereignty and freedom from US hegemony, if they hadn’t dared to spit in the Goliath’s face and instead cooperated, like Colombia has done for so long, been obedient, surely today they wouldn’t be suffering under this cruel madness! But hey, we’re not going to stand around and let them suffer, are we? Not while we’re here in the land of the free and the home of the brave, right? [Cue the Team America anthem]. I mean, we gotta show up for them and teach them about how good it is to have freedom. It’s not us that’s in the “echo chamber,” it’s them! So, let’s just go ahead and topple the leadership, shall we? Give them the Get Out of Jail Free card that all innocent civilians deserve. Once they’ve been freed of the tyrant’s grip, they’ll open their eyes, right? They’ll come asking for freedom from none other than the folks who invented it, the U, S, of A!

This belief is garden variety Neoliberalism 101, believe-everything-that-cable-news-tells-you level of insight. For decades the economic global order has been propped up on the expectation that it would take Chomsky-level intelligence to fully grapple with the subtlety of the sanctions regime weapon the global hegemon has deployed ever since the dollarization of the global economy. How sly and subtle is its subterfuge, no one will notice it at all. That’s why, mostly before the internet, folks just assumed that people all over the world were suffering in their own countries because their leaders were assholes and nothing more, that they were begging for the country with the biggest stick to come and save their asses. And so here we come with our B-52s and our democracy coming to evaporate the dictator so that the people can live and be free. But now that information is more widely available, more and more people see the naiveté of this belief, that people are suffering across the world for reasons more complex than the mere cruelty of their leaders and that the global hegemon known as the USA is more often than not directly responsible, through some form or other of economic warfare, for the suffering they are experiencing. Cabello fails to understand this basic insight. She is still living in 1994, when neoliberalism was rip-roaring. But we don’t live in that world now.

Yet, Hasan Piker is not much better. I watch clips of his streams every now and then. I find them immensely entertaining and in the pantheon of bro-y left podcasters his is one of the better ones. He’s been cured of Trump Derangement Syndrome, so, unlike so many in his cohort, he’s thinking more or less straight. Still, he’s just a rad lib dressed up as a socialist. When the midterms come around he’ll start doing what they all do, shill for the Democratic Party, start striking fear of the MAGA “fascists” into the hearts of people who know better, wave the “democracy is dying” stick around to get people to pull the lever for capitalist politics yet again. When it comes to actual socialism, he’s no one to consult.

On the flip side, his response to Cabello’s statement is what the young’uns refer to as “based.” Or maybe they’re not so young anymore and it’s just that I’m incredibly old. Either way, his response was inspired. A literal monosyllable with the weight of an atomic bomb. He’s right: as was just outlined above, Cabello’s ideas are, well, they’re gross, there’s no other way to say it. It’s gross to be stuck in the past. It’s gross to have such a large platform and waste it on kindergarten level ideas like “Communism breeds suffering.” Does communism breed suffering? Well, yes it in fact does. Or at least the “communism” that we’ve seen so far (aka, not really communism but state capitalism), with the exception of maybe China, though there’s plenty of suffering there regardless. But that’s just the thing: there’s suffering everywhere. Another economic system that breeds suffering is the other c-word, capitalism. Think of the millions of bodies that have littered the fields in the name of plunder. That’s capitalism for ya. So what’s your point? Yet, this still doesn’t even get to the heart of the matter Hasan was communicating in his pithy response: the idea that it is because Cuba is communist that it is suffering is a form of bigotry and bigotry is gross. He’s right.

But he’s also wrong. After all, Cabello was also expressing pride in her Cuban heritage. She is sad that her country is suffering. She may be wrong about why it is suffering, but that doesn’t invalidate her sentiment. By emphasizing her platform and trying to administer a strike against it, Hasan failed to understand her personal investment in Cuba’s future. I mean, she’s sending money to the country! Doesn’t that count for something? Hasan thinks that national pride doesn’t matter. Well, maybe during the neoliberal era, when thousands upon thousands of good paying jobs were offshored to Mexico and China and the newly unemployed were told not to OD on fentanyl and that national borders don’t exist and they should learn to code, maybe during that time Hasan would have had a point. He could have told a Cuban national to shut the eff up about “her people,” that that’s, as he calls it, “standpoint epistemology,” that the idea of a people defined by national borders is a relic of the imperial era, that we are now living in a global village, where democracy shines a light on all. Hasan is quaint. He still believes that nationality doesn’t mean anything, that the pride people take in their heritage and their culture and their country count for nothing. The reason why all it takes is for a war like the one in Ukraine (our funding of which is another relic of the neoliberal era) to break out to turn someone like John Mearshimer—an international relations foreign policy realist who had to labor in the wilderness for years and years because his ideas were taboo—into a widely recognized and highly regarded public intellectual is only because neoliberalism is in fact over. Way over. Nations matter again. Borders matter again. To say this is not xenophobic. The taboo on strong borders has been lifted. You don’t have to be for this. You can be against it of course. Yet, we aren’t still a lick closer to actually being able to discuss immigration like sane individuals. Ask Minneapolis. Ask ICE. See what kind of answers you get there. But the difference now is that whether or not you’re for open borders or against open borders, whether or not you are for nationalism or against nationalism, you can’t be for it or against it based on the old logic, a logic that was embedded in the neoliberal order which is now over. I don’t think Hasan gets that. Like Cabello, but for entirely different reasons, he’s stuck in the neoliberal era. Gross.

Whoever this “rosey” is, I think they got caught in the wrong crossfire. If Cabello is neck-deep in the past and Hasan is perhaps coming in second place at waist-deep, it seems from a quick gander at their X account that rosey is at the very least only knee deep stuck in the neoliberal era. Their account seems innocent enough. Their tweets are just random comments on random retweets. They’re not particularly incisive nor are they particularly offensive or controversial. Typical GenZ commenting on Clavicular and other “looksmaxxers” and other arcane GenZ stuff a GenXer like me has no business knowing about let alone writing a Substack post—ahem, pardon me, Substack “article”—about. Seems like they’re just narrating the X vibe. Seems like that that’s what they tried to do by inserting themself into this debate. (I am calling rosey a “they” not because I’m a wokey but because I’m not sure of their gender and don’t want to assume that the word “rosey” necessarily denotes a female, though it does suggest femininity, but I’m going to stop talking now before I get low key canceled).

Their comment wasn’t the guest star body slam out of nowhere Hasan seems to think it was. Poor lil ol rosey who got caught in the crossfire was just doing their GenZ thing, making wry and giggly comments on the absurdity of the internet. And they were right! Hasan IS a partisan. He might not be a particularly special case of partisanship. Certainly there are more rabid, utterly irrational, completely bought-and-sold-on-capitalist-politics partisans out there, both on the right and the left, who couldn’t think critically about opposing viewpoints even if you promised them a lifetime vacation in Maui. I’m thinking of BlueAnons like Brian Tyler Cohen or the PodSave bros on the left. I’m thinking of MAGAs like Laura Loomer and Christopher Rufo on the right. People who basically take a form of drugs. People who are constantly so high on partisanship they need to check themselves into the equivalent of the Betty Ford Clinic for partisans. Bad cases of Trump Derangement Syndrome. Bad cases of Democrat Derangement Syndrome. There isn’t an issue so neutral these zombies wouldn’t find a way to retrofit as evidence that the other side really is just a bloodsucking cabal of pedophiliac vampires. Someone got a speeding ticket? I bet it’s because the Democrats are really a storefront for omophagia. Someone got arrested? I bet it’s because ICE is really the modern day equivalent of the Freikorps. They are one of the biggest reasons why we can’t debate anything reasonably. If the so-called War on Drugs always turned a blind eye to the demand side of the equation, to the presence of the appetite for drugs in the US fueling the cocaine wars down south, the War on Partisanship will need to learn this lesson and address how large platformers like Loomer and Cohen create a false demand for toxic partisanship. Lil ol rosey was just telling it like it is! Of course, Hasan is WAAAY better than the aforementioned cynics, but he’s still a partisan. Please quote me: when the midterms come around this November, Hasan will “all of a sudden” come out rooting for the Democrats. Hasan is anti-capitalist politics outside of election cycles. In them he might as well speak at the DNC. He has no real objectivity. His response to Cabello was motivated out of disgust with opposing viewpoints. He also has “standpoint epistemology,” just of a different sort than Cabello does. He’s wrong.

But rosey, sadly, is also stuck in the neoliberal era. Not as bad as Cabello and Hasan. But nonetheless stuck. That’s because her critique stems from the tendency to ascribe nefarious motivations to all opposing ideas. Versions of this tendency include Russiagate (“You didn’t vote for Trump, Putin did”), the War in Ukraine (“If you oppose the war in Ukraine Putin must be paying you”) opposition to open borders (“You must be racist”), opposition to closed borders (“You must be a communist”), anti-abortion stances (“You hate women”), pro-abortion stances (“You are a murderer”) and the list goes on. What these beliefs and accusations all have in common is their refusal to critically engage with the opposing viewpoint and instead opt to “throw out of court” the evidence because it was somehow tampered with, either through the secret influence of a supposed axiomatic enemy like Russia or through the contaminated lens of bigotry. I suspect that these kinds of retorts are based in insecurity. When someone holds a deeply held belief but is not capable of defending it critically and objectively and when that someone encounters another person who holds an opposing viewpoint and can defend their viewpoint critically and objectively, you often get this, a lunging towards an escape route that supposedly invalidates their opponent’s belief system, not by way of refutation on the basis of its own logic, but by way of some unfalsifiable suspicion as to the invalidity tout court of their claims. It’s another version of mob rule. Of conspiracy thinking. Anyone with half a brain should be outright disgusted with this form of thinking. It is a cancer on the body politic. It is one of the more gigantic reasons everything is turning to shit.

The Marxist professor Gabriel Rockhill has recently published a grand version of this theory with a book called Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism?, a book whose title says it all. Rockhill’s thesis concerns itself with your granddaddy’s Marxism, the kind that praised the spirit of Marx’s worldview and system as essentially correct, but that also invoked the horrifying spectre of world communism as an unfortunate bastardization and, depending on who you ask, as a wholesale refutation of the original idea of Marxism—or at least as the downgrading of it in some meaningful way. In his book, Rockhill rises to the defense of Vietnam, China, the Soviet Union and other communist regimes, the so-called regimes of “actually existing socialism,” and accuses Western Marxists like those of the Frankfurt School as essentially being CIA stooges propped up by the Deep State to fend off domestic communist agitation. Sounds like a Tom Clancy novel. Engage with the actual ideas of the Frankfurt School and try to refute them on their own terms? Why bother? Instead accuse them of collaboration. In fact, that’s what Rockhill calls this form of leftism: the “compatible left.” No need to try to understand what all of these midcentury professors were yakking about. All you need to know is that their ideas too conveniently fold into the big, bad ol’ United States of A! They’re wrong! The US is BAD!

No one should celebrate Citizens United. Money in politics is indeed toxic. But guess what would’ve happened had that SCOTUS decision gone the other way: a techno-bureaucratic governance structure over party politics that would have done as much harm to the democratic process as money in politics does. There’s no convenient way out of capitalist politics. You can’t cure capitalist politics by taking money out of politics. That’s because capitalism is not money. It’s a world order. You can’t just demagogue your way out of complicated debates. Hasan was making a case, a one-word case, against Cabello’s neoliberal thinking. He unfortunately falls victim to neoliberal thinking himself, but his response should be taken at face value so that a critical response can be given at face value. Once we start imputing ulterior motives, such as partisanship, as a means to win the debate, we are lost. We are at the level of conspiracy thinking. Russiagate is conspiracy thinking. Rockhill’s notion of the “compatible left” is conspiracy thinking. And, sadly, good ol rosey’s brief turn in the Twitter spotlight is also conspiracy thinking. And, as a kneejerk, irrational reaction to the inorganic nature of global trade agreements and the erosion of naturalized frontiers such as national borders, there’re few things more neoliberal than conspiracy thinking. rosey’s guilty of it.

And now we come to the end. Or at least the end of folks stuck in the neoliberal era. Hasan’s second response was over the top, rude, and overreactive. He didn’t have to commit an ad hominem. He could’ve just made his point. He loses more points for doing that. But let’s put that part aside. Because he’s just one more level above the fray of this dispute in emphasizing the material needs of the victims and searching for the correct cause of their suffering. In essence, he is saying to rosey that if one must ascribe a “side” to his agitation, let that “side” always be on the side of those who suffer. Yet, neither he nor Cabello may be accused of failing to side with the victims here, the Cuban people. Both have expressed their advocacy for their plight. No one is saying they don’t care. The difference is just a matter of causation. Cabello thinks it’s Cuba, Hasan thinks it’s the US. His response to rosey is a fleshed-out version of his response to the Cabello story: he thought what she said was gross because it failed to see where the source of the suffering was coming from. And the reason why debates about sources get so heated is because if you don’t get that part right, if you assign the wrong actor as the prime mover in a chain of injustice, then you might as well be the one who is starving the people because your ideas are always going to result in just that. Hasan is correct in emphasizing the global hegemon’s role in the suffering of the Cuban people. As a matter of state propaganda, you are not going to hear very much in the way of the cruelty of these sanctions regimes. Hasan should be applauded for pointing that part out. It needs pointing out.

Nonetheless, the debate between the Cabello perspective and the Hasan perspective is a very old one. Both sides are reproducing an old logic that, being of the neoliberal era, no longer is relevant. Cabello’s thesis, that the dictatorship in Cuba has created the present situation of mass suffering, is the old Cold War yarn about how communism leads to shit. Hasan’s thesis, that all it takes is to scratch the surface a bit to see that the security state apparatus of the United States deploys clandestine measures to destabilize and topple global actors that are inconvenient to its foreign policy goals, is more sophisticated than Cabello’s, but it nonetheless falls under the rubric of outdated thinking.

The truth is more complicated. And, thanks to the current metamorphosis in the evolution of global capitalism happening right now as we exit the neoliberal era and enter an as-yet unnamed new one, we have access to truth that neither of these Cold War relics can offer. The fact is that regimes like Cuba, the USSR and China, though they were inspired by the ideas of Karl Marx, at the end of the day are and were political entities scrambling for survival in a hostile geopolitical order. To the extent that they have adapted to global realities is the extent that these countries, though they profess otherwise, are not communist or Marxist in any meaningful way, at least not in ways that actual Marxists should ever condone or support. These are authoritarian regimes of state capitalism, a political formation that Marx would have abominated. If Marx were alive today, he would have moved to the United States because he would have rightly seen that the closest thing that upholds his original ideas for the potential of human freedom and flourishing exists in this country, where the spirit of the American Revolution, a revolution that serves as the necessary precursor to the future proletarian one, lives on. He would not be pro-China today, no matter how big of a portrait hangs in Beijing. These “communist” countries outwardly profess his ideas but are incapable of actually bringing about the conditions he wrote about. Let me be clear: these countries are incapable of carrying out their professed communist goals not because they are inherently evil or dysfunctional, but because the conditions for true socialism have still not come about in the world. Capitalism is constipated socialism and we still aren’t eating enough fiber. And any country who believes otherwise is going to very soon come under the heel of the capitalist boot and will need to revert to state capitalism, which is what every single so-called communist regime has done. And Marx would have abhorred state capitalism. Incidentally, state capitalism is precisely where our country is headed as well, though of a different caliber than the others. Everything that everyone ever crows about regarding Trump is really just the anxiety over inexplicable and invisible convulsions like this evolution into state capitalism we are experiencing. Once again, don’t blame the big guy. Blame the big system.

This explains why Cuba has been so authoritarian. For political survival, minor state capitalist regimes who have explicitly declared an unwillingness to conform to the global hegemon’s wishes face the threat of annihilation and must always point to the global aggressor as proof that, if only they would remove the boot from the neck, they could prosper, but for now that means locking everything down. You’ll have your bourgeois freedom when we say that the aggressor above us has relented but not until then. This is also what Iran does. Notice that China does not do this. They don’t need to: they have nukes and also they can simply stop exporting and then the US has to play ball. But these other mid powers? No such luck. By the actually existing and unavoidable law of global monopoly capitalism these countries will sooner or later fall. Because a true and deep understanding of the way global capitalism functions reveals that the system is automated and whether you are Micronesia or the United States has no relevance for the truth which is the autonomy of the system. There is no evil empire. That is the Chomsky-Hasan Piker thesis that is as reactionary as the Miami-Cuban-expat thesis: one is oikophobic and the other is xenophobic. They’re both phobic. We must not fear. We must search for the truth instead.

No one should celebrate what Trump-Rubio is doing to Cuba. No one should ever celebrate the squeezing of the neck. But by the same token that no one should celebrate it when the US squeezes the neck, no one should celebrate when Cuba does. We should be against squeezing necks. But we should also realize that Cuba can’t but squeeze the neck nor can the US but squeeze the neck. This is an intractable conflict whose only result is the eventual capitulation of the less powerful global actor.

Of course this is horrifying. Indeed, we are Marxists because we believe that global capitalism results always in horror. But we are also Marxists because we maintain cool heads as we watch the system eat itself. We don’t ascribe motivation and causation and agency where only autonomy and system-independence exist. No one is ever morally right. No one is ever morally wrong. You can’t “take a side” on this debate. You can only watch in horror. Let the horror guide not just your conscience but your damn head. Think instead of reacting. Trump’s November national security document laid everything out super clear: hemispheric dominance. This explains Greenland. This explains Maduro. This now explains Cuba. It’s all capitalist politics. This is not our fight. Our fight lies elsewhere.

As socialists, we must always be suspicious of the way in which the images with which we are pummeled on a daily basis are deployed as part of a grander design oriented towards the maximization of the interests of capital. Therefore, in the same way that it is clear now that the January 6th riots and the George Floyd riots were always intended—on some subconscious level—to provide consumers of political content with a fresh supply of images more or less expressly designed to instigate a strengthening of political affiliation (depending on previous position on the political spectrum) to either of the two capitalist parties, we may say the same regarding the much fresher supply of images of social unrest coming from Minneapolis.

The footage of Trump supporters storming the Capitol was used by the Democratic Party to foment outrage against the Republican Party, which the former saw as an enabler of a new kind of disgraceful politics. The footage of property destruction across American urban landscapes in the wake of the murder of George Floyd was likewise used by the Republican Party against the Democratic Party, whom they saw as a party corrupted by sexual perversity and obliviousness to land and country.

As socialists we must always raise a red flag when we notice this kind of interlocking symmetry between the two capitalist parties and inquire as to what is underlying these trends. We should seek to deconstruct the single system upon which the appearance of duality is situated.

It may be too soon to make grand conclusions while the events in Minneapolis continue to play out. Over the weekend there was yet another American protester who was killed at the hands of an agent from the Department of Homeland Security. It would not be an exaggeration to imagine some American alive and breathing as these words meet the reader’s eyes who nonetheless in some passage of weeks or even days will no longer be with us because of an escalation involving ICE agents in some city.

That said, it is not too soon to raise a red flag. The killings of Renee Good and Alex Jeffrey Pretti already demonstrate the continued enlistment of human resource for the cause of capitalist party politics.

The justified outrage that comes in the wake of human slaughter by the arm of the state should not blind us to the invisible causation of these events. Nor should we ignore the ease with which the capitalist state instrumentalizes our justified horror. In a world where the interests of capital hold the reins, any outrage against state violence is used to strengthen party fealty. Supporters of the Democratic Party will view images of human casualty in Minneapolis as evidence of cruelty and inhumanity on the part of their political enemies. Supporters of the Republican Party will subsequently view these very reactions of horror as more grist for their hatred of liberal activism. Both of these reactions serve the interests of the two capitalist parties.

It is not a contradiction to see that both reactions are reasonable. It is true that ICE agents are cruel, ideologically motivated and incompetent, and that therefore something must be done about them. It is also true that antagonizing ICE agents obstructs the will of 50% of voters. This is not the same thing as saying that protest is not a First Amendment protected right. Nor does it in any way minimize the tragedy of the deaths nor excuse the inhumanity of the tactics.

It is true, however, that what is perceived as inhumanity by one side of the political divide is perceived as justice by the other. To many Americans who were justifiably disturbed by the immigration policies of the previous administration, images of ICE agents on the streets are a relief. If it is not possible to admit that concern over lax immigration policies is legitimate then it is not possible to truly understand how ICE agents ever were placed in the position of exercising this kind of extreme power in the first place.

The question of politics must never be subordinated to the question of morality (nor, for that matter, vice versa). When confronted by images that stir our moral outrage we must understand what political considerations went into the entrance of those images into our field of vision. It does not vitiate against the righteous horror we must feel when we see our fellow citizens shot to death on video to simultaneously consider what political value our outrage has for the capitalist parties. This is not accidental. Even as Lindsay Graham condemned the January 6th rioters, and more or less Trump with them, he saw clearly the political value for his party: the Jan 6 riots would be instrumentalized by the Democrats for their own interests and, in a system with seamless inter-party collaboration, one party’s interests always, in some way or other, serve the interests of the other.

One of the Democratic Party’s pied pipers, Bill Maher, who is chiefly interested in insuring the centrist, petty bourgeois vote for that party, has already started instrumentalizing the images from Minneapolis for the interests of electoral success in the midterms. Having on Senator John Kennedy from Louisiana on his panel the other night, he made the case for a rightful sweep of the midterms on the part of his political party of choice, the Democratic Party.

He was, in fact, correct that the images were horrific. However, he was incorrect in making a moral case for the ouster of the Republican Party from leadership in Congress. That’s because there is no moral case ever for ousting one of either of the capitalist parties from leadership roles. There is only ever a political one, and only one that serves the interests of capitalist politics.

The senator’s response was likewise correct: illegal immigration is against the law and the law must be enforced. To his credit, he raised the issue of strategy, to which Maher replied, “That’s the key,” and invoked due process, equal protection and, interestingly, Terry v. Ohio, the 1968 Supreme Court ruling that granted police the right to conduct questioning and searches based upon reasonable suspicion. The “law and order” messaging on the part of the other side of the political divide is already being made clear on national television ahead of the midterms and voters who consider the right of safety and security to be above the right to protest will likewise be morally activated enough by the senator’s words to cast their vote in the midterms accordingly.

This episode of Real Time with Bill Maher illustrates the degree to which moral considerations are manipulated by the capitalist parties for the purpose of shoring up any opposition to the interests of capital. In order to oppose those interests, citizens and voters would have to watch this episode and perform a dialectical separation between the moral and the political; they would have to see that the opposition between the two sides being represented by the senator and the host is a false one because, morally speaking, both sides are correct. Therefore, the opposition is really only political. And since, in the realm of capitalist politics, there is no room for class politics, there is also no space in the public square for this kind of dialectical separation.

We must be able to understand that the revelation of a false opposition is also a revelation of the informing of the political by the moral. As we think of the rights of average Americans to be able to sell their labor power competitively, a consideration with regard to immigration policy, we need to also think about the rights of Americans to protest the inhumanity of the Bonapartist state without fear of loss of life. Does a politics in America exist that can support both of these moral concerns simultaneously? Of course not. Therefore, we must, on a grassroots level, encourage the intellectual activity of separating the political from the moral to bring the two into balance with each other. Greater class consciousness will create the conditions for wider performance of this activity.

Returning to the issue of the day, as socialists we must be honest and admit that, though the moral consideration must be seen on its own terms, the situation in Minneapolis presents no reason to believe the case is any different than it was on January 6th or during the George Floyd riots—no different, that is, in terms of the political valence. The reason we know this is because, as was the case with the other two instances of social unrest, whatever cause instigates protests that turn into riots is only done so in the wake of the latest outrage performed by a political adversary whose motives and strategies are otherwise deeply familiar. The next time we are asked to pull a lever at a ballot box we must ask ourselves what further escalation in two years time such support is insuring.

If you voted for Biden because of January 6th—and many, many voters were motivated by just such a cause—you voted in, with full awareness, the instigation for the other party’s voters to bring about a future outrage.

If you voted for Trump because of Biden’s immigration policies—and many, many voters were motivated by just such a cause—you voted in, with full awareness, the instigation for the other party’s voters to bring about a future outrage.

Neither side of the political divide may feign ignorance about what the other side is willing to do to protect its own political interests. Such pretenses therefore inculpate one’s later actions performed in the name of whichever causes belong to one’s side.

To sift through the noise, socialists must be in a position to ask themselves extremely difficult questions. To use an example from electoral politics, one should ask before one casts one’s vote for a candidate representing one of the two capitalist parties whether that candidate’s effect in office is sufficiently salubrious to justify what one must admit will be nothing but further escalation in the realm of capitalist politics. Elections in which candidates do not meet this threshold should therefore be boycotted.

For example, in the case of the recent New York City mayoral election, I chose not to boycott it because of the above consideration. I voted for Zohran Mamdani despite him being a Democrat and I voted for him not because I believe his brand of social democracy is geared for success, but because he met that above threshold: I do believe that in some, perhaps invisible, way his mayoralty will have an incrementally positive effect on the possibility of a future dictatorship of the proletariat. But the fact that he called himself a Democratic socialist and had won the nomination as the Democratic Party candidate were insufficient for me on their own to vote for him without further consideration.

I tell this story as a way of illustrating what I believe to be a healthy intellectual procedure for the decision to support—or not support—any political agency within the realm of capitalist politics. This procedure need not only be reserved for elections; it may also serve to disambiguate the images that seek to insure party affiliation through the instigation of moral outrage. Within the realm of capitalist politics such images of horror, whether they be of the targeted assassination of a hero within rightwing politics or the ambient slaughter of leftwing human rights activists performing their inalienable right to protest, are almost always designed to instill complicity with the capitalist order and enervate productive noncooperation with the interests of capital. To those who wanted war with the left because Charlie Kirk was killed in cold blood on live TV we must say, “do not obey the interests of capital.” And to those who want war with the right because of the unjust slaughter of Renee Good, Alex Jeffrey Pretti and whoever is next, we must say the same. We must react with appropriate horror to all of these events while also guarding against unwitting collaboration with the interests of capitalist politics.

Witness the gate crashers at the well-meaning dinner party.

There is Xi, glaring from the corner, practically hiding behind a Christmas tree while maintaining a truly disconcerting silence.

There is Putin, sitting at the assigned seat of an innocent foreign dignitary, cooing terrifying threats into the ears of the guest to his right.

And there’s Trump, hogging the hor d’oeuvres platter, leering at female guests and eating foie gras with his bare hands.

Oh, the disgrace!

These poor dinner guests, today’s panoply of pearl-clutching New York Times opinion writers, feverishly checking their bank accounts because of course they should be concerned given what’s going on here at this “civilized” gathering.

Poor Ben Rhodes, whose headline today reads, “Trump is Falling for a Trap We Can All See Coming.”

It’s true, Ben: this lug is a real nincompoop!

There is Jamelle Bouie, whose headline today reads, “There is a Sickness Eating Away at American Democracy.”

I know Jamelle, these criminals had no right to crash this democratically assembled dinner party. They weren’t even on the guest list!

Always scandalized Michelle Goldberg, with whose pearls no one else’s can compete in size, has a headline that reads, “Don’t Call it Regime Change. This is Something Else Entirely.”

Unprecedented! Yes, Michelle, we have never seen this desecration at cocktail hour before. How rude!

Oona A. Hathaway writes about an “unraveling,” which is technically true, I guess, if by unravelling you mean a changing of the rulebook her department head at Yale didn’t inform her of.

Many of those inflamed guests decided to team up and call themselves “The Editorial Board” and write about the five year anniversary of when all those hooligans got a little too rowdy and started breaking windows during an “insurrection” (read: riot). “Lawlessness” is apparently reigning, though, if you read this article from an author who long ago received his vaccine for TDS, you might see that there’s just a new set of laws being observed, ones that probably offend the “innocent” dinner guests, but a set of laws all the same.

Let’s let David French have the last word from the dinner party, whose headline today reads, “Trump is Unleashing Forces Beyond His Control.”

True, all too true, David, this madman has no clue the fire that he’s playing with.

Let us have compassion for the dinner guests. After all, they are very sick. You wouldn’t walk into the lounge at Bellevue and try to berate all of the patients as they genuflect at invisible specters and twitch over perceived insect bites. Instead, you would try to find the cure.

Or not. Maybe they’re incurable. Maybe they will go down with their sinking Fantasy Island cruise ship, chardonnays in hand, as their pearls jingle and then stop, while they doggy paddle in the deep ocean, waiting for a skiff to come and scoop them up so they can go have brunch at some overpriced cafe in the West Village.

After they leave their crashed dinner party, they can rest their heads on their sateen sham encased memory foam pillows as Stephen Colbert soothes their frayed nerves and affirms their delusion with his own delusion broadcast more widely than anywhere their pens could ever reach. The president can’t run two nations, Colbert insists, because “he can’t even run.”

The problem with this joke is not that it isn’t funny. It kind of is. The problem is that it doesn’t really say anything other than that the President likes to eat cheeseburgers and ice cream.

Yet, it might rankle them a bit, but the beginnings of a cure for this severe outbreak at the New York Times today might consist in a simple half-hour’s viewing of one of the episodes of the current season of South Park.

In it, the President is depicted as a conniving, manipulative, bloviating child with a tiny penis and an ability to cuck Satan himself. The depiction is infinitely more funny than anything a late night TV show host or SNL writer’s room might pull off. Yet, its virtue lies less in its uproariousness and more in its ability to actually foist a meaningful critique.

The Trump of the Trey Parker and Matt Stone imaginary is an amoral voluptuary guided only by libidinal reward, but—and this is the crucial part—along the way of the satisfaction of his desire he is capable of unmasking the attendants around him vying for control as the hypocritical sycophants they really are. No one is able to get ahead of him, not because of his intellect, but because of his cunning.

It is a vision of the kind of hedonic maximalism laid out long ago by one Marquis de Sade, whose own fiery vision of desire and instinct was a logical response to the challenges of the Enlightenment period. Absent the superegoic diktats of paternalistic society, the feudal hierarchy which the modern era began to dismantle, Man is left to tarry with the totalitarian grip of his unconscious needs, so would the Marquis have us remember. All attempts to legitimize power from this point forward will need to scrutinize the dark drives inhering within all of us. Leaders of large polities, though they are tasked with greater responsibility, should nonetheless face examination according to yardsticks which are used universally. The challenge comes from the establishment of a consensus. But, thanks to the Enlightenment’s bourgeois overthrow of kingly prerogative, that consensus is always in flux. What is a “civilized” man to do?

South Park got the Marquis’ memo. When will everyone else?

“I said that the world is absurd, but I was too hasty. This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said. But what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart. The absurd depends as much on man as on the world.”

― Albert Camus

What do Maduro, the Islamic Republic, the Arctic Circle and Crimea have in common?

What they have in common is that they’re all sideshows to a main event, that being the global power competition between the US and China.

And like all political sideshows they need a political showman in order to manage them. It’s like spinning plates and never have we had a more qualified plate spinner than our present Donnie.

But don’t think that just because he’s good at spinning plates this means that he’s no good at handling the reality behind the scenes. As we have seen over the past ten years, one underestimates the Don at their own peril. And as we have also seen over the past ten years, Trump Derangement Syndrome is a serious condition, afflicting its victims with a crippling inability to see reality.

But let’s get back to the four corners of the East.

Put plainly, the late night exfiltration of Maduro by the US Military, the breakout of yet another round of protests in Tehran, the assignment of a Louisiana governor to oversee the acquisition of Greenland, and the revelation of stunning graft in Kiev all point to one felicitous fact—the world is changing dramatically, but the US is still in charge. It is felicitous because, when a hurricane hits your town, you want the police station to still be running. The very first outcome of the demolition of the local police department is an outbreak of deadly chaos and Uncle Sam is just that global version of a police department, like it or not, and it will prevent chaos. In his latest Compact piece, Chris Cutrone calls it a new “Pax Americana.” There’s only one other potential police department in the world than ours and that’s China: letting the birthplace of bourgeois freedom and democratic rule transfer its role as global cop at some point in the future to China just isn’t a rational decision for any American.

The fact of the matter is that the global trade agreement—often referred to as the Washington Consensus—of the neoliberal era has always been destined to demand this eventual capitulation of American sovereignty to Chinese dominance. Barring an active intervention in global affairs of the sort we are witnessing today on the part of the US, it is clear to see that IMF debt, trade surpluses and global dollarization, while a necessary adjustment to the global economy in the past, was always going to reach a tipping point wherein China would begin to dominate. That time has finally come.

This all started with a previous shakeup in the early ‘70s, with the Nixon Shock that broke the Bretton Woods consensus. Now we have the “Trump Shock.” The US, whether in fifty years or one hundred, would eventually go bankrupt and China would be the repo man in the ensuing forfeiture of goods. It is also clear that the Washington technocratic blob would never be poised to do anything about it. Hence, it is only the Don and his “art of the deal” that are up to the task.

Trump Derangement Syndrome’s chief victims have been and continue to be liberals. Addicted to their NPR tote bags and venti lattes, they simply can’t be trusted to do the honest work of translating Trump’s extemporaneous crudities into the astute foreign and domestic policies they actually represent. This is something very different than full bore support of those policies, mind you, but liberals fail in making this distinction, as well. That Venezuelan oil reserves, open trade routes in the Arctic, a cooperative Iran and a non-NATO Ukraine are of utmost interest for the kind of global stability necessary for the US to meet China where it is, this fact should be obvious to anyone paying attention. Furthermore, that the foreign policy blob of Washington, represented by the Clinton-Obama-Biden-Hillary-Kamala five-headed hydra, is constitutionally incapable of managing these affairs is also plain to see by anyone spending just one hour digging deep into geopolitical reality. Just listen to John Mearshimer to get a taste of what he calls “serious argument” and should impart an appreciation for some of the subtleties lying underneath all the propaganda. But the libtards refuse. They just want to replay 2016 over and over again like a lobotomized slot machine addict.

It seems that even some in Trump’s trusted MAGA base are also succumbing to a variant of TDS. We might call it AFDS (“America First Derangement Syndrome”). These libertarians voted for the Don on a non-interventionist peace ticket and they see nothing but regime change war state building in these new moves. America First, the Rand Pauls, Nick Fuentes’ and Dave Smiths of the Trump-voting base will have us know, demands a strict decoupling from this kind of adventurism abroad. Right now, they are crowing about a recrudescence of neoconservatism, the ideology of the very “swamp” they’d elected their dear leader to “drain.” The outbreak of antisemitism among some of the most extreme parts of the right can be traced to the appetite for a GOP civil war based on the grounds of this alleged betrayal of America First principles. Podcast hosts and Twitterfied GOP reps like MTG alike are having a cow.

But, just as the libs chronically do, these disgruntled libertarians and white supremacist statists misunderstand the moment. Just as with Trump, taking America First so very literally is a myopic failure at dialectical thinking. Indeed, a measure of dialectical treatment of the concept would offer more clarity on the rationale behind these moves.

America First means above all a foreign policy that prioritizes American interests, not a full bore anti-interventionist position. Just because we extract Venezuela’s leader two seconds before he reaches his safe room does not mean we are engaging once again in neoconservative nation building. Nor does it mean that we are acting like an empire if we try to purchase an ice shelf to the West of England. The moment is different than in the first decade of the millennium and not every unilateral global action is evidence of rapacity. Prioritizing American interests can mean a complete overhaul of the entire foreign policy apparatus that the Washington blob has upheld for decades. It might mean this because—spoiler alert—the world changes, as do facts on the ground. With Trump’s recent much discussed strategic policy memo all of that was made clear. He is only making good on what he explicitly set out to do.

It’s clear that both the progressive liberal response and the libertarian/race statist response to recent geopolitical events spearheaded by unilateral decisions on the part of the US are inadequate and maybe even delusional.

So what should the proletarian socialist response be? After all, we may be headed for a generation of true absurdity and cruelty, given the boldness of these pivots, and we need the best analytical tools to understand what is happening. As a science of politics and history, Marxism is best suited to this venture.

If you are truly a socialist, which means that you believe that revolutionary subjectivity inheres only in the working class, then you must admit that really there is nothing to be done right now.

What are you going to do? Join the liberals at another geriatric No Kings protest for each one of these coming indignities? Donate to Nazis in Ukraine? Take to the streets of Chicago to defend the Islamic Revolution? Move to an ice shelf in order to defend the sovereignty of a handful of somewhat ambivalent Greenlanders? Close your eyes and spin around and point at the nearest GoFundMe for some random violent splinter group vying for attention in Venezuela’s coming civil war?

The fact of the matter is that the liberal project has utterly failed. The proof is in the pudding and the pudding is everything we are witnessing. It is necessary—gravely necessary—to do a very long inventory of how the Left has lost its way and how it may regain its footing. This means that, in the face of the ensuing madness, the best course of action is no action, a kind of enlightened quietism. We are going to need the United States of America to stick around. After all, it comprises the capitalist core and it is only the core which matters for the revolution of the future. The idea that we are supposed to foment revolution abroad has been categorically proven wrong: nothing will come about through the Thirdworldist stance of today’s Left. Only a strong American working class, united in the face of capitalist oppression, will ever stand a chance at thwarting capitalist politics as such. And all of this insanity we are witnessing on a daily basis, from the inhumanity of bombed out cities to the ludicrous capture of world leaders from their bedrooms, is nothing but good ol’ fashioned capitalist politics. Real socialists have no role to play in these elite parlor games. Besides, the elites know full well how to keep the system running, contradictions and all, and we should trust the idea that if this ship doesn’t turn around, there likely won’t be an America in the future within which to begin a proletarian revolution in the first place. Let’s let them keep the economy afloat until such a time comes for a real working class solidarity to take hold at long last. Ignore the sideshow. See it as the epiphenomenon that is: the phenomenon is the class struggle undergirding it all.

Throw away that pussy hat and get back to reading Lenin and Lukáks and accept the fact that we aren’t going to live to see the changes we struggle for today, but that what we do or, more appropriately, what we don’t do today, matters greatly for the future soldiers of the revolution which, God willing, will be victorious on American soil, the only soil with enough industrial, financial and productive capacity to supply the means for honest revolution.

There are good reasons to be skeptical of the Mamdani phenomenon currently gripping national political discourse and you wouldn’t really know it from the hysterical braying coming from the right about antisemitism, terrorism, inexperience and fiscal chaos. Yes, there are worthy concerns behind those critiques, but the fever and panic with which they are being voiced point to something else going on. Methinks the lady doth protest too much. It seems eerily similar to a syndrome we’ve come to know very well over the past decade about another political star. It might be time to break out the DSM for another naming ceremony: let’s call it “Mamdani Derangement Syndrome” (MDS).

Like its Trumpian precursor (TDS), MDS renders the minds of those it infects with a distinct incapacity to reason, an almost abreactive twitching and an utter failure to envision alternative political realities. Both conditions are characterized by a regression to an outdated politics, in the case of TDS, to the rules-based liberalism of the Cold War era and, in the case of the more recent MDS, to the fiscal hawkery and xenophobia of the War on Terror era. Both are characterized by an incapacity to think through their political opponent’s policies. Both are fueled by the demagoguery of 24-hour cable news.

Just as in the earlier variant, no one who exhibits the symptoms of MDS seems at all capable of enough self-awareness to try to do something to get better. One very clear example is the wave of victimology language the right has been busy deploying since Trump was elected, chiefly with respect to antisemitism, as if they didn’t spend the last ten years carping endlessly about the left doing precisely the same thing only with respect to racism and sexism. Given that prejudice, it makes perfect sense why Zohran Mamdani would become their antisemitism punching bag, much in the same way Trump was—and for many still is—left-liberals’ racism-and-sexism punching bag. The old style now comes in the service of a completely different political orientation. It says a great deal about the nature of American political discourse that what originally spurs the outraged reactions of discontented Americans often becomes the very political instrument which they subsequently wield against their political enemies once they themselves are in power.

Yet, syndromes and their variants aside, there is a kernel of truth in even the most apoplectic irrationality, a germ of real concern. The most vituperative MSNBC viewer, pounding the table about Russiagate, nonetheless is technically correct that the unitary executive theory supporting Trump’s authoritarian moves is a questionable basis for the functioning of liberal democracy, as we are witnessing almost daily in the form of ICE raids and Caribbean boat bombings. Similarly, the most atavistic Fox News viewer, eternally scandalized by urban life and minorities, nonetheless is right that Zohran Mamdani’s vault to the heights of national political life, no matter how much left-liberals want us to believe otherwise, represents yet another wave of out-of-touch progressive liberalism.

I have been meaning to write this piece for quite some time but wanted to wait until I was certain I could give this thought process its due. It’s important, now on the eve of Election Day, to give as honest an appraisal as possible, one cleansed of partisan hackery. As a formerly Democratic political independent, I am deeply skeptical about change candidates coming from this party I lost faith in, especially after witnessing what became of Bernie Sanders and AOC. It’s taken me some time, but I’ve come to believe that, sadly, the same thing goes for Mamdani. Very little in the Mamdani experience gives cause for openness to the possibility that it might be different this time, that he, unlike his predecessors, really does have a chance at avoiding the party capture that has deflated the possibility of a real alternative to the MAGA movement’s reactionary politics. I have come to see the DSA, the organization which produced the Mamdani campaign, as merely a recruitment instrument for the Democratic Party and a way to depotenate radical energy. Nothing Mamdani is advertising—not the free buses, not the Free Palestine, not the free childcare—strikes me as particularly innovative. These are soundbites and flag-rallying, “build the wall” for the cultural left.

Any kind of actual radicalness in his platform should be understood more for what is absent than present: he has cannily avoided the critical race discourse and liberation ideologies that doomed the Democratic Party at the ballot box last November and it is perhaps only this that explains why his candidacy has so far seemed to avoid being lumped into an Exhausted Politics basket. Other than that, he’s a standard Democratic Party progressive and we’ve already seen what becomes of Democratic Party progressives: they get swallowed into the spectacle machine and do next to nothing to challenge the establishment—ironic, given that challenging the establishment is their ostensible rallying cry.

Yet, the shrewdly deployed absence of wokeism in Mamdani’s campaign explains why there is even a Mamdani Derangement Syndrome to speak of: the right hated and continues to hate AOC but they seem to have reserved a more complex emotional mixture for Zohran, a melange of panic and fear in addition to the odium. They have a difficult time sticking the woke scarlet letter on his forehead the way they are able to with many other progressives and are thereby forced to escalate to grotesque levels, some of which include the revivification of reprehensible war on terror language like “jihadism.” The shrewdness of Mamdani’s having taken note of the political winds, the by now familiar unpopularity of wokeist language, has brought out a fever among the right who are at pains to foist a rational critique of his campaign and therefore, in absence of their beloved anti-wokeism standby, resort to some of the most reactionary law and order sloganeering we’ve heard since the Giuliani days.

In a way, this mid-1990s descent into the basement of politics actually reveals something interesting about the Mamdani experience. What might actually be most reasonably expected of the coming mayoralty of one Zohran Mamdani? A look to those 1990s might hold the answer. He seems to call to mind another DSA-bred mayor, one whose short-lived political career inaugurated, in the form of Rudy Giuliani, a seismic and controversial change in the course of New York City’s history. It is here difficult to ignore the parallels with the forlorn tenure of David Dinkins (no less because Mamdani himself name-checked him during one of the debates as one of his favorite mayors!). A rendering of Mamdani’s coming mayoralty as Dinkins 2.0—with the concomitant two-term “cleanup” tenure by some future Republican mayor touting a Giuliani 2.0 campaign—is almost unavoidable when you listen to the cartoonishness of his opponents’ attacks: not just the islamophobia but also the “who’s gonna pay for it?”.

These responses should be as concerning as they are myopic, for behind every accusation is a dare, one that, when it becomes acted upon, in this case by a single Mamdani term, inevitably leads to the set-up of yet another progressive Democrat unleashing chaos onto the streets which in turn requires a law-and-order Republican to once again “clean up the mess.” This should be by now a familiar dynamic within the uniparty structure of capitalist politics and it seems to me it’s where we’re headed over the course of the next decade and a half.

If only there were something to fear in Mamdani, as those with newly contracted cases of MDS would have us believe. In that case, he truly would represent a meaningful chance of real political change. The fact is that the Mamdani phenomenon is really a Mamdani mirage, the latest incarnation of a capitalist politics disguised as radicalism. Michael Lind wrote about this astutely:

[T]his is not a pro-worker agenda, and working-class New Yorkers who prefer well-paid jobs to a synthesis of low wages and public charity have noticed. In the Democratic primary, Andrew Cuomo won more votes than Mamdani among both the working class and the rich, as well as among black New Yorkers. Mamdani’s base is the same as that of conventional Democrats: young, college-educated professionals and immigrants who compete with native New Yorkers for jobs and housing.

Indeed, as if the political organs of his campaign weren’t proof enough, the PMC-rooted agenda of the Mamdani campaign is plainly evident in its a) smiley presentation, b) its thirdworldism and c) its focus on consumption.

A truly radical, working-class politics is skeptical of these kinds of presentations.

a) Working class people are rightly suspicious of people who are too slick and in this manner Mamdani is like a DSA Pete Buttigieg, the kind of person who lures you in with great diction, never mind his resume indicates someone the working class understandably mistrusts. Mamdani has no Kinsey Institute to speak of, as Mayor Pete does, but the absence of any history in organizing is and should be a red flag to working class people.

b) Similarly, the thirdworldism of progressive politics, a current of political thought slowly showing itself to be a dead end for the left, runs strong in the Mamdani phenomenon. My colleague Geoff Shullenberger has written powerfully about this aspect of the campaign. Foregrounding overseas national struggles against empire holds the same pitfalls for the left which many entities in the NGO industrial complex do—a laundering of moralism in the service of forestalling real change. Capitalism actually has no truck with Free Palestine energy, as the last two years of political immobility have painfully demonstrated. This doesn’t make opposition to the genocide wrong, though it does disqualify it as a real basis for American left organizing. Mamdani, sadly, has little relevance for someone seeking the left to change its focus from thirdworldism to the domestic working class-centered politics that has the most potential to effect real change.

c) Finally, the working class emphasizes the production side, as opposed to the consumption side, of the political economy, where working class power, through organization, holds the better hand. Mamdani’s campaign foists New York’s affordability crisis, part of the reason of the success of his campaign, as an imbalance which state power can control at the turn of a dial. But state power is not the only actor capable of price controls. On the other side of the economy are wages, where increases accomplish similar goals to price reduction, though they require a type of working class solidarity sorely missing in an era that has seen union density shrink to pitiful levels. Organizing the working class in order to exert more influence on capital is a grimy process involving grueling networking, sometimes in poverty stricken areas, and it would take decades to truly develop it and people like Mamdani, who use telegenic social media presence to rise above into the imagistic stratosphere, are not disposed to the Lord’s work in this way. This is perhaps the central problem with the party to which he belongs and it is the main reason why anyone who truly does wish to see a radical left agenda take hold in this country needs to abandon that party.

At the end of the day, Mamdani, no matter how much he is heralded as a heroic fighter looking out for the common man—and no matter how much he is childishly labeled a tankie—constitutes only a metastasization of capitalist politics, not its opposition. It won’t matter in the grand scheme if his mayoralty will keep the promises made on the campaign trail: they most assuredly will be as mutable as the once “ironclad” Obamacare subsidies currently being mangled and fought over in Congress. That’s because social democratic progressive politics—and Mamdani’s push is merely its most modern incarnation—is and always will be mere capitalist politics. It reveals the same contradictions any other variants of capitalist politics do. Rightists may relax: there is no communist threat! In fact, they can also cheer, for neither is there any hope for real change. Those with Mamdani Derangement Syndrome ought to be ashamed, not because they’re wrong about what they say about him, though they in fact are. Rather, they should be ashamed because, though they’re right in being afraid, they’ve misdiagnosed the threat. The real threat is not, as they stupidly believe, some coming plague. It’s actually something worse—the crushing ennui of more of the same.

A piece which I had lovingly gestated for years and finally put to writing last year has been published today at the Manifest Station. Below is the link:

https://www.themanifeststation.net/2025/08/03/vanlife-a-diary-part-one/

The piece is a travelogue cum musicological treatise set during the unforgettable very first tour my old band Interpol took in September of 2002, a road trip through the United States by van that was explosive, not just for the fact that it coincided with the week after our successful first record was released (and was therefore full of the extraordinary ambience of discovering the nation while selling out clubs throughout the month), but also for the fact that it coincided with the first anniversary of 9/11 and therefore had very much to say in terms of the beginnings of the War on Terror and how politics would clash with culture over the coming decades.

This is the first of four parts to the essay. Each part uses one CD which I played on my Discman while on the road as a portal into the psyche of the road trip.

I don’t know if I will be publishing the next three parts before my essay collection is published, so the next three may very well come in book form, as this essay will join the eleven others which I will be including in that volume when it is eventually published.

I hope you enjoy this time capsule from a time that seems both very far away and yet, owing to how much of an impact it had on me, so very close indeed.