Spectres and Souls
there are no barbarians anymore
those people were a kind of solution
unless we
ourselves
unless we ourselves
are The
Barbarians
unless we
ourselves
are The
Barbarians …
Laurie Anderson added these words to her incantation-like reading of C.P. Cavafy’s poem Waiting for the Barbarians, featured in China Heritage on the eve of 5 November 2024, the day of the US presidential election. It was a day that also coincided with the commemoration of Guy Fawkes and his failed Gunpowder Plot, an attempt at tyrannicide and regime change during the reign of King James I. In rural New Zealand — where China Heritage is produced — fireworks crackled through the night as part of a tradition that dates back to 1605 as voters in North America went to the polls.
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On 1 January 2024, China Heritage published Nutbush City Limits — 2024, Mao, Trump and China Heritage to mark this momentous year in US and global politics. It featured a reprint of A Monkey King’s Journey to the East, the meditation on Donald J. Trump and Mao Zedong with which we launched China Heritage on 1 January 2017. We also returned to the themes of Spectres & Souls, China Heritage Annual 2021, the subtitle of which was ‘Vignettes, moments and meditations on China and America, 1861-2021’.
Waiting for the Barbarians in a Garbage Time of History and MAGADU — Kubla Khan, Xanadu & the 2024 American presidential election extended our series Spectres & Souls, which followed the 6 January Insurrection in Washington and the inauguration of Joseph Biden as the 46th President of the United States.
We introduced Spectres & Souls with a two-part essay titled Better Angels, Persistent Demons in which we traced some of the forces in contemporary American politics and culture back to the New Deal of the 1930s, the John Birch Society in the 1950s and the rise of what has long been identified as American Christian fascism. We also noted some eerie parallels between conservative thought in the United States and Chinese thinkers and ideologues in the 1980s. As many people ‘are plunged into an anticipatory grief’ (Moira Donegan’s expression), we would encourage our readers to familiarise themselves with the group Southern Christian Leadership Conference and figures like Fred C. Koch, William F. Buckley Jr., Patrick J. Buchanan, Pat Robertson, and Norman Podhoretz, among others (see also Tim Alberta, The Ideas Made It, But I Didn’t, Politico Magazine, May/June 2017). In contrast to this clutch of conservatives, writers like Gore Vidal remain of vital, and unsettling, relevance (see, for example, Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia).
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Over years, the insights of Chris Hedges, essayist, journalist, commentator, have added uncompromising clarity to our work. Below, we reproduce The Politics of Cultural Despair, an essay published by Hedges in the immediate aftermath of the 2024 US presidential election. After an ‘intervention’ by the inimitable Jonathan Pie, we reprint The Dawn of the Trump Era, an analysis by Yascha Mounk, a writer and academic known for his work on the crisis of democracy, who we first met in A Monkey King’s Journey to the East.
From our Antipodean perch, it would appear that we are in a time that can neatly summed up as FAFO —
Fuck around and find out.
— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
6 November 2024
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At Harris’s rallies, her audiences during these past hundred and seven days would chant her slogan, “We’re not going back!” But, it turns out, we are. Harris fell short. Americans, at least enough of them to tilt the outcome, chose Trump’s retrograde appeal. The question now is a different one: not if we are going back but how far?
— Susan B. Glasser, Donald Trump’s Revenge, The New Yorker, 6 November 2024
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The Politics of Cultural Despair
Chris Hedges
It is despair that is killing us. It fosters what the Roger Lancaster calls “poisoned solidarity,” the intoxication forged from the negative energies of fear, envy, hatred and a lust for violence.
In the end, the election was about despair. Despair over futures that evaporated with deindustrialization. Despair over the loss of 30 million jobs in mass layoffs. Despair over austerity programs and the funneling of wealth upwards into the hands of rapacious oligarchs. Despair over a liberal class that refuses to acknowledge the suffering it orchestrated under neoliberalism or embrace New Deal type programs that will ameliorate this suffering. Despair over the futile, endless wars, as well as the genocide in Gaza, where generals and politicians are never held accountable. Despair over a democratic system that has been seized by corporate and oligarchic power.
This despair has been played out on the bodies of the disenfranchised through opioid and alcoholism addictions, gambling, mass shootings, suicides — especially among middle-aged white males — morbid obesity and the investment of our emotional and intellectual life in tawdry spectacles and the allure of magical thinking, from the absurd promises of the Christian right to the Oprah-like belief that reality is never an impediment to our desires. These are the pathologies of a deeply diseased culture, what Friedrich Nietzsche calls an aggressive despiritualized nihilism.
Donald Trump is a symptom of our diseased society. He is not its cause. He is what is vomited up out of decay. He expresses a childish yearning to be an omnipotent god. This yearning resonates with Americans who feel they have been treated like human refuse. But the impossibility of being a god, as Ernest Becker writes, leads to its dark alternative — destroying like a god. This self-immolation is what comes next.
Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party, along with the establishment wing of the Republican Party, which allied itself with Harris, live in their own non-reality-based belief system. Harris, who was anointed by party elites and never received a single primary vote, proudly trumped her endorsement by Dick Cheney, a politician who left office with a 13 percent approval rating. The smug, self-righteous “moral” crusade against Trump stokes the national reality television show that has replaced journalism and politics. It reduces a social, economic and political crisis to the personality of Trump. It refuses to confront and name the corporate forces responsible for our failed democracy. It allows Democratic politicians to blithely ignore their base – 77 percent of Democrats and 62 percent of independents support an arms embargo against Israel. The open collusion with corporate oppression and refusal to heed the desires and needs of the electorate neuters the press and Trump critics. These corporate puppets stand for nothing, other than their own advancement. The lies they tell to working men and women, especially with programs such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), do far more damage than any of the lies uttered by Trump.
Oswald Spengler in “The Decline of the West” predicted that, as Western democracies calcified and died, a class of “monied thugs,” people such as Trump, would replace the traditional political elites. Democracy would become a sham. Hatred would be fostered and fed to the masses to encourage them to tear themselves apart.
The American dream has become an American nightmare.
The social bonds, including jobs that gave working Americans a sense of purpose and stability, that gave them meaning and hope, have been sundered. The stagnation of tens of millions of lives, the realization that it will not be better for their children, the predatory nature of our institutions, including education, health care and prisons, have engendered, along with despair, feelings of powerlessness and humiliation. It has bred loneliness, frustration, anger and a sense of worthlessness.
“When life is not worth living, everything becomes a pretext for ridding ourselves of it … ,” Émile Durkheim wrote. “There is a collective mood, as there is an individual mood, that inclines nations to sadness. … For individuals are too closely involved in the life of society for it to be sick without their being affected. Its suffering inevitably becomes theirs.”
Decayed societies, where a population is stripped of political, social and economic power, instinctively reach out for cult leaders. I watched this during the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. The cult leader promises a return to a mythical golden age and vows, as Trump does, to crush the forces embodied in demonized groups and individuals that are blamed for their misery. The more outrageous cult leaders become, the more cult leaders flout law and social conventions, the more they gain in popularity. Cult leaders are immune to the norms of established society. This is their appeal. Cult leaders seek total power. Those who follow them grant them this power in the desperate hope that the cult leaders will save them.
All cults are personality cults. Cult leaders are narcissists. They demand obsequious fawning and total obedience. They prize loyalty above competence. They wield absolute control. They do not tolerate criticism. They are deeply insecure, a trait they attempt to cover up with bombastic grandiosity. They are amoral and emotionally and physically abusive. They see those around them as objects to be manipulated for their own empowerment, enjoyment and often sadistic entertainment. All those outside the cult are branded as forces of evil, prompting an epic battle whose natural expression is violence.
We will not convince those who have surrendered their agency to a cult leader and embraced magical thinking through rational argument. We will not coerce them into submission. We will not find salvation for them or ourselves by supporting the Democratic Party. Whole segments of American society are now bent on self-immolation. They despise this world and what it has done to them. Their personal and political behavior is willfully suicidal. They seek to destroy, even if destruction leads to violence and death. They are no longer sustained by the comforting illusion of human progress, losing the only antidote to nihilism.
Pope John Paul II in 1981 issued an encyclical titled “Laborem exercens,” or “Through Work.” He attacked the idea, fundamental to capitalism, that work was merely an exchange of money for labor. Work, he wrote, should not be reduced to the commodification of human beings through wages. Workers were not impersonal instruments to be manipulated like inanimate objects to increase profit. Work was essential to human dignity and self-fulfillment. It gave us a sense of empowerment and identity. It allowed us to build a relationship with society in which we could feel we contributed to social harmony and social cohesion, a relationship in which we had purpose.
The pope castigated unemployment, underemployment, inadequate wages, automation and a lack of job security as violations of human dignity. These conditions, he wrote, were forces that negated self-esteem, personal satisfaction, responsibility and creativity. The exaltation of the machine, he warned, reduced human beings to the status of slaves. He called for full employment, a minimum wage large enough to support a family, the right of a parent to stay home with children, and jobs and a living wage for the disabled. He advocated, in order to sustain strong families, universal health insurance, pensions, accident insurance and work schedules that permitted free time and vacations. He wrote that all workers should have the right to form unions with the ability to strike.
We must invest our energy into organizing mass movements to overthrow the corporate state through sustained acts of mass civil disobedience. This includes the most powerful weapon we possess – the strike. By turning our ire on the corporate state, we name the true sources of power and abuse. We expose the absurdity of blaming our demise on demonized groups such as undocumented workers, Muslims or Blacks. We give people an alternative to a corporate-indentured Democratic Party that cannot be rehabilitated. We make possible the restoration of an open society, one that serves the common good rather than corporate profit. We must demand nothing less than full employment, guaranteed minimum incomes, universal health insurance, free education at all levels, robust protection of the natural world and an end to militarism and imperialism. We must create the possibility for a life of dignity, purpose and self-esteem. If we do not, it will ensure a Christianized fascism and ultimately, with the accelerating ecocide, our obliteration.
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Source:
- Chris Hedges, The Politics of Cultural Despair, The Chris Hedges Report, 5 November 2024
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The Dawn of the Trump Era
To understand how Trump could become the dominant politician of this era, it’s time for all of us to take a long, hard look in the mirror.
Yascha Mounk
Donald Trump arrives at an election night event at the Palm Beach Convention Center on November 06, 2024 in West Palm Beach, Florida. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)Barring some extraordinarily unlikely twist, Donald Trump has won. Here are my first reflections, written on no sleep and a lot of caffeine, on what that means for the new political era we are about to enter. Thanks for reading and for supporting our work. It’ll be a long four years.
For the past decade, Donald Trump has been the most famous and influential man on the planet. But he had too many failures and too many electoral defeats to his name to be able to claim that he dominated a whole political era. That changed overnight.
Trump is now going to be remembered as both the 45th and the 47th President of the United States. He is very likely to win full control of Congress. He is even likely to win the popular vote—making him only the second Republican to do so in a third of a century. All of this will allow Trump to impose his will on the nation to a much greater extent than he did during his first term in office.
Back in 2016, the whiff of aberration hung over Trump’s success. His opponents could claim that his victory was some strange historical fluke. They could put it down to foreign interference or to Russian hackers. Political scientists confidently pronounced that he represented the final, Pyrrhic victory of a declining electorate—the last, desperate stand of the old, white man.
But aberrations tend not to happen twice, and 2024 puts the last nail in the coffin of that distorted interpretation. Though some cable news hosts may be tempted to replay their old hits in months to come, only a few diehards will believe Trump to be the Manchurian Candidate this time around. Perhaps most interestingly, it is now clear that Trump put into action the advice which Reince Priebus gave Republicans after their second consecutive defeat to Barack Obama, to court minority votes the party had traditionally conceded to Democrats. His victory is not due to old white men but rather due to his success in building a deeply multiethnic coalition—as his crushing victory in Florida, a state that long ago became “majority minority,” attests.
How could this possibly have happened?
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It is time to take a long, hard look in the mirror.
I have, at this point, been going around warning the world about the danger posed by authoritarian populists like Donald Trump for about a decade. And I continue to believe that these politicians, from Hugo Chávez in Venezuela to Viktor Orbán in Hungary, and from Narendra Modi in India to Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico, pose a serious threat to democracy.
American institutions are much stronger than many observers have come to believe. But Trump, much more experienced than he was at the outset of his first term in office and emboldened by a much more resounding victory, will test American democracy in a more serious way. Over the next four years, we will, as I argued in these pages in the week before the election, see a clash between an unstoppable force and an immovable object.
And yet, it is time to admit that, in purely electoral terms, the argument that democracy is on the ballot simply does not seem to work. The reason for that is not just that people care more about pocketbook issues like inflation or that incumbents have in general had a bad run of late. It’s that they don’t trust Democrats on the issue of democracy much more than they do Republicans. According to one exit poll in Pennsylvania, three out of four voters in the state believe that democracy in the United States is threatened; among those who do, it was Trump, not Harris, who had the edge.
This hints at the fundamental fact of the past decade, a fact that elite discourse still has not fully confronted: Citizens’ trust in mainstream institutions has been absolutely shattered. Corporations and the military, universities and the courts, all used to enjoy a certain modicum of residual trust. That trust is now gone. It is unlikely to return anytime soon.
The extent to which most people now mistrust mainstream institutions is in many ways disproportionate. Despite Trump’s apocalyptic description of its current state, America remains one of the most affluent and successful societies in the history of humanity. And while ideological excesses have significantly weakened American institutions over the course of the last years, these institutions do remain capable of impressive work: For every ridiculous article about racism in the knitting community that The New York Times publishes, for example, it also puts out several sober reports about important world events.
And yet, we must admit that the wound is to a significant degree self-inflicted. A small cadre of extreme activists obsessed with an identitarian vision of the world—a vision that pretends to be left-wing but in many ways parallels the tribalist worldview that has historically characterized the far-right—has gained tremendous influence over the last years. And even those institutional insiders who were able to keep this influence at bay through clever rearguard actions were rarely willing to oppose them in explicit terms.
This was one of the most consequential vulnerabilities of Kamala Harris’ campaign. While running for the Democratic primaries in 2019, she wedded herself to a slew of identitarian positions that happened to be deeply unpopular. Sensing that the political winds had shifted, she did not reprise her flirtations with the idea of defunding the police or decriminalizing illegal border crossings. But neither did she have the courage to explicitly call out the ideological foundations for these deeply unpopular positions—or to reassure millions of swing voters that she would be willing to stand up for common sense when doing so might risk inspiring a little pushback within her coalition.
Donald Trump is far outside the American cultural mainstream. (Yes, I believe that to be true even after reckoning with his unexpectedly strong showing tonight.) But the problem is that Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party, and the wider world of establishment institutions with which they are widely associated are also far outside the American cultural mainstream.
Harris’ campaign had many opportunities to address that problem. She could have asked her supporters not to self-segregate by race and gender the moment she became the official nominee. She could have defended a woman’s right to choose without condoning late-term abortions and stood up for the value of vaccines while acknowledging pandemic-era overreach by public health authorities. She could have chosen to make her case to the millions of swing voters who listen to the most popular podcast in the country. But she did not do any of that.
I don’t know whether Harris’ failure to mitigate Democrats’ glaring political weaknesses was due to fear and indecision or due to ideological conviction and a distorted perception of reality. But I do know that the price that she—and the rest of the world—is paying for that failure goes by the name of Donald J. Trump.
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Trump has, since his entry into politics, been the spearhead of a populist international. And so his ability to come back from the political dead, likely reconquering the White House even after his refusal to accept the outcome of the 2020 election had seemingly rendered him radioactive, should serve as a loud warning to moderate forces in other parts of the world.
Brazilians recently managed to oust Jair Bolsonaro. Poles last year managed to send Law and Justice to the opposition benches. It would be tempting to conclude that this closes the chapter on those political forces. But from the Peronists in Argentina to the Fujimoris in Peru, populists have, again and again, proven to be much more adept at returning to power than contemporaries assumed.
This makes it all the more important for citizens of other countries to resist the temptation to sit in judgment of Americans over the coming days. I can already observe in international media, especially in Europe, a tendency to blame Trump’s likely reelection on every conceivable stereotype about Americans. It is, hundreds of commentators around the continent will likely write, because Americans are racist and sexist and bigoted that Trump looks set to take office again.
But while each populist incarnates some of the particular qualities of their specific national context, it should by now be amply evident that every country is vulnerable to this form of political appeal. French and German elites have done a somewhat better job of protecting their countries’ institutions from the ideological capture that has contributed to the profound breakdown in trust in the American establishment. But many of the same trends are well underway in those countries as well. And sooner or later, voters who deeply distrust their own institutions are likely to vote for an anti-establishment bullfighter of their own.
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Until yesterday, it was still possible to hope that Trump would be remembered as a historical blip, an outsider who somehow managed to turn a few elections into a contest over his ideas and his personality, before finally exiting the political scene in disgrace. Today, it seems much more likely that he has cemented his standing as the figurehead of a political movement that will lastingly transform the politics of the United States—and, perhaps, much of the democratic world.
Trump will almost certainly attack some of the constitutional checks on his power over the course of the next four years. He may very well sell out key American allies in Central Europe and the Far East. Democrats should absolutely stand up to him when he does. Protecting the system of checks and balances that has allowed America to weather previous periods of deep partisan polarization must be a particular priority. And if Trump should overplay his hand, as well he may, he could quickly lose the support of those swing voters who just gave him such a resounding showing.
But Democrats would be making a big mistake if they simply reverted to the #resistance playbook which has failed to inflict a decisive defeat on Donald Trump or his movement in the past. What they need to do if they want to ensure that the Trump era lasts fifteen rather than thirty or even fifty years is much harder than that: They need to build a political coalition that is broad enough to win durable and sizable majorities against Trump as well as other politicians of his ilk. And that will prove impossible without a serious reckoning with the ways in which they, and the wider ecosystem for which they stand, have lost the trust of most Americans.
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Source:
- Yasha Mounk, The Dawn of the Trump Era, Substack, 6 November 2024
It’s always darkest . . . before it turns pitch black.
— John McCain
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