There have recently been a series of insightful pieces from various writers on the subject of the current administration, pieces which taken together, present a pretty startling picture of our affairs, albeit from different perspectives. I'd like to take a moment to put some of this together and stabilize my own shifting state of understanding.
As a note of warning, this will be a fairly abstract and esoteric discussion, much like a fair amount of my pieces lately, as I'm still struggling to integrate various frameworks of thought into my own. The bewildering landscape of our collective affairs certainly doesn't help cultivate a stable sense of understanding.
Now, I'm not sure that the administration really knows what it is doing, but I'm also not sure that the administration is entirely in chaos either. There seems to be a learning process going on here. There will most certainly be a lag time, and a whole galaxy of political chaos and confusion, because a very large political body is transforming its operative modalities of rule, modalities that are built on decades of rule in turn. We do also have a constitutional order that is over two centuries old, but it is an order that has buckled several times in the course of U.S. history.
There is much to say about political chaos and confusion - and the nature of chaos in general, for that matter - but for the time being I'll have to leave that aside and address it later on.
What I'm interested in at the moment is the growth and concentration of private power. For decades, this destructive force was managed in the private sector with market competition, and regulated through the balance of legal, legislative, and executive state power. But now this force has overtaken public office.
And let's be clear: there is quite a bit of attention focused on Trump for obvious reasons. He now embodies the worst characteristics of private power. However all of that attention obscures the reality that his embodiment represents the culmination of decades of encroachment on the part of private power, in the form of the neoliberal political and economic project. Excuses and even favorable comparisons of the previous administration are more than distasteful, however much we miss that last patch before the edge of the precipice. As for the current administration itself...
Whatever Trump's inner life is like, whatever his intentions are, we can't know. What we can know, or at least speculate after, is how he is likely to act when his ego is threatened. He will marshal all of the resources - and perhaps more importantly, privileges - at his disposal, to preserve the vastly inflated image that he carries of himself. In a pluralistic society, this must necessarily mean the development of a unique authoritarianism, which is to take hold of the levers and materials that it finds around itself.
Of course, the more resources that he drags into his orbit towards this end, the more people that he breaks to serve his distorted needs, the more powerful the illusion of his own power becomes. Naturally, the growing heft of this illusion will necessitate ever greater methods of repression to sustain it.
What is relatively certain is that he will fight to preserve his private world in the context of the American presidency, transforming that very public world to reflect his private world in turn. And many after him, all aspiring to the power and efficacy that he now embodies, will learn more about just what they have to do to have it and hold it, and they will get better at it.
But at the same time, now that power is concentrating into very private battles for control over vast public spaces, the loci of those battles are going to become immensely brittle and unstable regions. Because what pervades these conflicts is a toxic mixture of distrust and ambition towards domination. Private power, with its greedy ambition to surmount, must distrust its entire universe by necessity, and instrumentalize all that surround it as means and objects to aggrandize itself. And where one distrusts and surmounts the universe, one is likely to get the same back, which as it happens, amplifies one's distrust and desire for domination. The instability is reinforced.
Unstable regions must generalize to everything they are connected to, if they are to sustain themselves.The nation and the globe will become even more unstable places. And I don't envy those who aspire to the helm. Of course, I don't really envy any of us at that point.
This is a uniquely American crisis, and the cascading global and domestic crises that are begat will be unique to our time. One can only peruse history for analogues, to speculate about the course we will take in time. A general direction may be apparent, but the specifics of that direction are another thing entirely.
It is true that American power works very differently. It is closer to pure bourgeois power, whereas European power in the run-up to the great wars still bore the signature and residue of the old feudal kingdoms, especially in its hard nationalism. We haven't seen bare bourgeois power - its always reached to proxies to do its dirty work - and now we will see it gradually unfurl its grim pedals.
Gazing back over European history for example, one finds that the architecture and planning itself is structured very differently from our own, a difference which mirrors the changing state of our very social relations over time and space. Compared to a factory, the vectors of collapse may be radically different in a cathedral. However, the effects of collapse are similar enough to the occupants of both.
