re: #401 Randall Gross

I agree that while much of the Trumpenproliat is blazingly stupid that many in their leadership are long term strategists who know how to read that crowd. It’s reminds me of those people who used to “gut up” and walk among the dead to control hordes of walkers on “The Walking Dead.”

See, I just don’t think “stupidity” is a good construct from the get-go, because it ignores that Trumpism is articulation of a want on an individual basis, but as a system of interests it’s a naked assertion of entirely-understandable authoritarian politics that’s been built up to by centuries of American culture and American agency within the world. Trumpism is radical redistribution of capital and license to the ingroup because “in the old days” that was what made America powerful. Like the cattle baron, that’s not stupid it’s an amoral calculation of what is possible.

That so many Americans like this idea is not about their standard testing scores, but about culture creating entirely-normalized, often non-partisan base assumptions about how Americans and America should exist in the world. There is presumption…and demand…of a quality of life that is not sustainable without constant subsidization and exploitation, alongside a vehement individualist denial that the subsidization and exploitation create that surplus. We don’t talk about where the two centuries of surplus comes from, and we especially don’t talk about how capital and government coordinate to maintain precarity—the neocolonial project of keeping poor countries poor enough that they can make cheap goods that act as a subsidy for the slowly-getting-poorer citizens of wealthy countries.

Trumpism cuts that Gordian Knot of discourse by just saying: yes, we need to be explicit that we’re rigging the game, and that the rigging is good because we’re inherently good. It’s building on a whole series of bypasses American conservative culture has built: God is now capitalist, there are no systemic problems only individual responsibility and sinister foreign conspiracies,

People keep stepping over the most obvious and continuous thesis of Donald Trump: that America must be cruel and dominating to succeed, and that Americans must embrace that cruelty, value it, to be American. It’s most present in how he talks about war and policing, but it’s the entire basis of MAGA: you shouldn’t just inflict the harm, you should celebrate that inflicting of harm because it gets you what you want.

Reactionaries haven’t been fooled, they simply value power over meaning.