Trump, Clinton, and Sanders supporters alike, each in their own ways, were led by their values and beliefs in times of endless contradiction into a world in which their interests and needs are the least important objective, a world in which voters and audiences are either useful pawns to the power-structure or they are in its way. African Americans have endured that reality for decades in their treatment by elected officials and the businesses community as simultaneously useful voting constituents, an oppressed blank slate upon which to paint enormous and false communitarian promises, and a permanently oppressed, structurally and socially ostracized working, consuming, war-fighting, internally conflicted underclass. (The Democratic Party has been, in many ways, guiltier of that strategy of elite distance and racism than the Republicans in electoral processes).
Trump, his counterparts, and each of us live with a part that wants to take everything for ourselves and ruin everyone in the way. Money as a goal is endless. Money is an idea. There is always more money, and this becomes clearer the less of it there appears to be in material life. Once one is convinced that one constantly needs more of something that one can never have enough, or the most, or all of, one sacrifices one's self, health, and relationships to the mad pursuit, creates serious risks to the environments, individuals, and social orders around them, and no longer behaves in a sane manner. It is addiction. It is pathology. Pathological consumption and possession become a constant neurotic task, solution, and illusion used to cover, repress, and abandon the meanings of the strange emptiness of living uncertainly but certainly unto death every day.
The less conscious we are of this death factor in our social and political imagination, the more vulnerable we are to it, subordinated to the compulsion, ready to use every resource available against every perceived threat to any narrowly defined and broadly applied value we hold. That is seemingly, so far, the only consistent mindset and tactic of the Trumpists. Pathological consumption is a state of being that preserves only itself, at the expense of anything else necessary. Everything in the future, if we speak in terms of climate change particularly, is poised to be sacrificed as quickly as possible under the Trumpists, to preserve this state of pathological consumption. This is a war against children.
Trump -- as Wall Street was to the Occupy Movement -- is not the problem to lash out against, but a perfect symbol, a perfect articulation, of the meaning of who and what we must mobilize for and with. He is the child of our enemy, and his character will always only be able to become its child. Trump stands naked in spaces where few American leaders have left the shadows in a long time, though they have always poked their heads out (See the preface to Mike Lofgren's The Deep State, for more on that point). A clear demonstration of who not to become, what not to value -- again, like Wall Street -- Trump can help those who plan to resist form a coherent picture of who we might want to become, what we might value, as individuals and societies, and how we might want to engage in that conversation.
But the entire society is pathologically consumptive and increasingly distanced from itself, and must stay that way if the tradition -- namely the corporate leviathan business tradition -- will run smoothly. Trump is an example, a symptom, of a pathological society. He is, as Jon Stewart once said, "America's id." He is a perfect, way too on-the-nose mash-up representation of everything about the American character that takes, that is selfish, that is violent, that is both endlessly ignorant and endlessly ambitious, that at once sees the self as the most important value and priority and therefore closes off the kind of love and consciousness needed to have a self at all, the part of us that touts our greatest failures as our greatest successes, and sees an historic, narcissistic, heroic, masturbatory business opportunity in the moment when history collapses on its children.
This mash-up quality of Trump is why his voice fits better in a Tweet or Youtube clip than a press conference, interview, or anything that can be controlled by anyone else. Every thought and solution he has is a spontaneous cultural combustion of chance, repetition, regression, and accumulation.
Trump's ideology is, at its core, destructive, partly made clear by the fact that as an ideology it is completely incoherent, perpetually contradictory, openly so. The agenda of Trump and the Republican Party -- in every one of the fast, monster executive orders and House proposals flying by -- is to destroy things and hurt people; it is to openly, nakedly, and proudly induce mass, long term pain on millions of real people and call it mass greatness, implementing mechanisms of mass suffering that will outlive their own moments in history. This process, almost obviously by now, will snowball indefinitely. American society has been in decline, with almost half of the population living in or near poverty (see also here), perpetual war always on the horizon and around the ship, the end of regulation and the completion of privatization, and the most blatant imbecility and unpredictability ever to oversee the most dangerous weapons in human history in the United States. The Trumpists are speeding everything up.
The more the Trumpists are challenged, the more drastically they will react. The more unstable, volatile, and uncertain American political and social life becomes, the more the Trumpists will hone their skills at blaming everyone but themselves -- not as a method of growing their base but of increasing and solidifying the loyalty of the base they already have. It is an effort to create a core that will serve them with blind loyalty, and never ask any hard questions. Reince Priebus is a good example of this kind of figure. The Republican Party -- which looked like it could not move any further to the right before Trump -- enjoyed a tiny moment of having a backbone, standing up for the people, finally calling out one of their candidates for having gone too far, and then once Trump won they almost all jumped in line to become his b*tch.
There will be others, however, mostly outside of the establishment, who will oppose the Trumpists and everything they try to do. Once the lies become an unreliable tool for maintaining loyalty to the mission of possessing, consuming, and destroying anything and everything, the more the Trumpists and much of the establishment beneath it may see violence and force as their only available tool and language. When lies no longer maintain an uncertain order in a democracy, authority and force bring crushing certainty; bad lies always cover worse truths. As tools of order-making on the part of consolidated power, lies are a gateway drug to violence in times of instability, history has elaborated.
The Victims of this War -- Just the Beginning
I work at a youth center in my community. On Trump's inauguration day, I was at work. There were common threads among the kids about their feelings toward Trump. Many of my co-workers, many kids, and probably many parents, were distraught over their historical experience on that day. Some moments, the kids wanted to talk about it. They range from ages six to nineteen, and I was curious about what they think.
Asked how they felt about the election, almost all of them said, "scared," or "afraid." Asked why they felt afraid, most of them said something like, "everything," and asked what they felt they could do about it, most said, "nothing." One, an older kid, said we could only deal with the repercussions of Trump locally. One girl said that if she had the chance to kill him, she would, and walked away quickly, and one young boy said, to the last question, "I don't really know yet."
Trump's rise exposes us to war against the future -- war on the environment, on the Muslim, Arab, African, African American, Mexican, Chinese, Native American, LGBTQ, Jewish, female, disabled, and poor white communities. It is a war on education. It is war on suspected criminals without trial, both through civilian executions on American soil by police and the drone and targeted assassination campaign abroad. It is a war on our banking infrastructure, economic equality, and internet freedom as, for example, Net Neutrality is on its death bed. It is an abandonment of any control over the corporations that are hollowing out the country, trashing the planet, manipulating the consumer and political public mind in the process, like AT&T, EXXON, Goldman Sachs, The Energy Transfer Partners, and more. Trump has Tweeted to increase the number of weapons in the nuclear arsenal and been elusive about his military strategy with Russia, and antagonistic toward China, North Korea, Iran and many, many, many others.
Everything that can be done through the figure of Trump to wage an all-out war on the future seemed to have begun in his first moments and weeks in office. Any war, as Howard Zinn said, "is a war on civilians." A war on the whole future of the possibility of decent life for civilians is a war against children on a massive scale.
As the Standing Rock Tribe, the feminist and LGBTQ community, Black Lives Matter, education activists -- including teachers across the country -- the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign, the independent media, anti-war activists like Veterans for Peace, Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions against Israel, Code Pink, along with unorganized resisters and many others, have confronted the agenda of the deep machine breaking through the surface to the public under Trump. The so-called "deep state" is no longer that deep. Whether Trump stays or goes, the forces that had to be kept "deep" for the state to sustain the interests and security of consolidated power before Trump will have been glorified and normalized through a new language and spectacle of American values of strength, peace through destruction, and the containment and control of history, progress, and critical thinking for a large enough core of the population to pose a threat to the future of the whole world. Some of our formerly darkest secrets will become hyper-masculine points of public pride in more contexts.
This openly -- or barely veiled -- pivot in the order-making debate toward freedom, security, and comfort la domination and destruction was clear before Trump won, particularly with the heavily militarized attitude of the Democratic National Convention in the run-up to the election and the rest of Hillary Clinton's warmongering.
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