There is tyranny in the womb of every Utopia. Bertrand De Jouvenel We’ve had about four months of Trump 2.0 now, and the most staggering thing about his new term is the sheer volume of damage he is able to do, mostly just from speaking and tweeting off the cuff. The overall sense is of a bloated and bored sultan, lying on a mountain of … Continue reading Poison Pyramid: The Tyrannous Tiers of Trumpism
Tis the time’s plague when madmen lead the blind. King Lear Those who are most asleep think they are most awake, being under the power of vivid and fixed visions, so that those who are most ignorant think they know the most. Theodotus (2nd century C.E.) The dizzying pace of Trump’s rampage through the tattered hallways of American precedent continues. The Walmart Price-Fixer-in-Chief can wreak … Continue reading The Illusory Future of Trumptopia
The significant problems we face today cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them. Albert Einstein There is always an easy solution to every problem — neat, plausible, and wrong, H.L. Mencken The world is not about Batman and Robin fighting the Joker. Things are more complicated than that. And nothing is scarier than the people who … Continue reading The Tyranny of Easy Answers: Trump’s comic-book destruction of America
You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. Buckminster Fuller You have to see it to be it. Billie Jean King Today is Martin Luther King Jr Day, and by a cruel twist of fate, Inauguration Day for Donald Trump. As we lurch into this new year and new era, partisans … Continue reading A Different Project for 2025: Finding an Off-Ramp from Trumpism
For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong. H.L. Mencken In (what feels like) the thousand years since the election, the postmortems have been coming fast and furious, including one on this very blog. The theories for the Democratic debacle are many, from the perseverance of systemic racism and sexism, to the global turn to strongman leaders in times of … Continue reading Where Do Dems Go From Here? The Chimera of Appealing to the Working Class
Clinging to politics is one way of avoiding the confrontation with the devouring logic of civilization. John Zerzan The only paradise is paradise lost. Proust In the big picture, the pandemic was probably the best thing that could have happened to Donald Trump. Had there been no Covid, he would have cruised to reelection, mainly due to the favorable conditions inherited from the Obama years. … Continue reading Convergence & Cataclysm: The Tectonic Plates of Trumpism
I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those of you who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution. Donald Trump (2023 speech) It’s hard to believe that it hasn’t even been a week since the election. I guess gnashing of teeth really slows down the passage of time. There have been plenty of analyses done already, and they will continue … Continue reading Postdiluvian Postmortem
The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth, and truth be defamed as lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world – and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end – is being destroyed. Hannah … Continue reading A Final Plea to Trump Voters
Every important social movement reconfigures the world in the imagination. What was obscure comes forward, lies are revealed, memory shaken, new delineations drawn over the old maps: it is from this new way of seeing the present that hope emerges for the future…Let us begin to imagine the worlds we would like to inhabit, the long lives we will share, and the many futures in … Continue reading Election 2024: The Aftermath
This fight is no longer between Democrats and Republicans. This is a fight between communism and freedom. It’s very serious fight. Donald Trump, August 27th An America where we care for one another, look out for one another, and recognize that we have so much more in common than what separates us. That none of us has to fail for all of us to succeed. … Continue reading Doom, Joy, and Reality: On the Moods of the 2024 Election
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