This is a guest post by SherAli Tareen, Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College.
At its core Rajbir Singh Judge’s dazzling monograph Prophetic Maharaja presents an argument for “dwelling in loss” rather than seeking the enticing yet entrapping desires for restoration, recovery, and healing. By writing a “historical narrative that refuses to historicize,” Judge pushes his readers to examine notions of sovereignty and history that the practice of dwelling might make available. Conceptually, through the example of Duleep Singh (d. 1893) and the politics his life and memory make possible, the book seeks to interrupt dominant scholarly notions of historicism and colonial logics of religion and sovereignty, that reappear in varied apparitions in contemporary scholarship as well. It is very rare for a monograph, and even rarer for a first monograph, to offer an example of close and patient reading that rattles deeply held and deeply prized normative assumptions of one’s field of intervention. Judge achieves precisely that. And he does so in multiple ways and registers.
In Panjab Studies, there is a pervasive trend of excavating a redemptive narrative of a Panjabi cosmopolitan ethos that might offer the fantasy of traversing and transcending the alleged juggernaut of religious convictions that according to this view stifle such “cosmopolitan” pasts and futures. The Sikh tradition, under the calculus of this desire for “Panjabiyyat” or “Panjabiness” can either work as a quintessentially hybrid religion that naturally inheres pluralism or as a model for a colonial infested discursive machine that can only be repaired through the prophylactic of secular baptism. Judge entertains none such fantasy. In fact, Prophetic Maharaja conducts a devastating indictment of the politico-conceptual coherence as well as the desirability of the secular quest for Panjabiyyat by presenting a reading of Duleep Singh’s quest for sovereignty that does not seek to resolve, recover, overcome, or redeem any restorative project of liberal redemption and goodness.
Through an analysis both painstakingly layered and theoretically vivacious, Judge masterfully walks his reader through a terrain of political theology populated by visions of sovereignty neither liberal nor secular, but rather nestled in the refusal to exercise the sovereign decision to historicize, humanize, and heal any alleged ruptures of history. Judge’s analysis of Duleep Singh’s attunement to the loss and possibility of sovereignty propels the reader to confront and wrestle with a grammar of life that is not driven by or available for secular projects of dividing that life into binaries like religion and culture, state and society, plural harmony and exclusivist bigotry. Life, Judge teaches us, taking a cue from anthropologist Talal Asad, is “essentially itself.”
One of the great lessons of this book that I found particularly striking and productive concerns its theorization of loss and its simultaneous recognition that loss escapes and exceeds any neat theorization. Judge is at his most brilliant and intellectually courageous during moments in this book when he meditates on the aporias of his own encounter with the conceptual constitution of his project. And remarkably, and again in a rare achievement, these are precisely the moments when his argument is most piercing and compelling. His discussion of loss is a great example of this. As Judge writes very early in the book (in its Introduction), signposting an analytical attitude and conviction he sustains throughout the monograph: “rather than provide a new theorization of loss-which cements a relation to loss-this book endeavors to reckon with the powerful resources that work on loss, such as mourning and melancholia, and what they have already provided.” Judge continues, in a flash of utter brilliance, “I contend with loss instead of transcending it through recovery [emphasis mine]…I do not tie a thread throughout the text that provides an adequate answer to loss because there might not be any answer to it. In this sense the book does not provide a theorization of loss but dwells in the various rhythms of loss. My goal is not to recognize loss and provide it taxonomic space but to sit with losses as they appear, disappear, and reappear throughout the text” (p. 13). This mini paragraph I have just cited represents a moment of tremendous significance in the study of South Asian History and Religion. Note, in the interest of careless readers who will rush towards the inconsiderate gesture, all too pervasive among historians of a certain ilk, to dismiss or undermine careful theoretical interventions as Judge’s here as convoluted high theory. Note particularly that dwelling, in Judge’s account, as both an analytical concept and as a mode and practice of life, is anything but passive inactivity. Exactly to the contrary, dwelling represents that aggressive commitment to a politico-conceptual ethic of refusing to repair and overcome loss through secular gestures of managing and healing the violence of history.
Dwelling in loss, instead of activating the secular instinct of historicizing, humanizing, and supposedly transcending loss makes possible a horizon of the political that comes to live with rather than attempt to overcome the aporias of life. Judge’s invitation to his readers to “sit with losses as they appear, disappear, and reappear” in the passage of a text or in the passage of history is I believe a profound call for suspending sovereign confidence in compensating for loss and treating the wound of historical contingency through the fantasy of historicist rigor, of returning life to its immanent materiality. What sort of politics and possibilities of sovereignty might become available by dwelling in loss, by sitting with rather than treating with the prophylactic of secular historicism the vertigo of historical conjunctures such as the one involving the loss, renewal, and diffusion of Duleep Singh’s aspiration for sovereignty? In asking and addressing this question, Judge successfully offers pathways for recognizing and exploring the political power and philosophical sophistication of imaginaries of sovereignty, like Duleep Singh’s, that are otherwise conveniently though perniciously catalogued as sorry tragedies of a colonized subject. Making Duleep Singh’s example speak back to and interrupt the alleged tragedy of his quest for sovereignty, Judge undertakes a critically important endeavor of decolonizing both colonial and contemporary secularist models of South Asian history populating the Western academy. This forum brings together outstanding scholars, conducting theoretically cutting edge critiques of secular power from multiple disciplinary perspectives, to engage, wrestle with, and celebrate a book with major ramifications and consequences in the study of religion, history, philosophy, and South Asia. The Prophetic Maharaja is in many ways a model and master seminar in bringing together invasive attention to the particularity of an archive and theoretical reflection that paves as well as shifts the terrain of multiple fields of knowledge simultaneously.
SherAli Tareen is Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College and currently a Patricia Crone member in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton NJ for the academic year 2024-25. His book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) received the American Institute of Pakistan Studies 2020 Book Prize and was selected as a finalist for the 2021 American Academy of Religion Book Award in the Analytical-Descriptive Studies category. His second book is Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship after Empire(Columbia University Press, 2023) which was selected as a finalist for the 2024 American Academy of Religion Book Award in the Textual Studies category.
Rajbir Singh Judge is Assistant Professor in History at California State University, Long Beach. Prophetic Maharaja: Loss, Sovereignty and the Sikh Tradition in Colonial South Asia was published in 2024, and over the next few weeks we have a series of contributors who’ll be offering their reflections, followed by a response from Rajbir. I’ll update this post with links to the other posts as they’re published:
There’s something about Trump that draws comparisons with Communism. The one I’ve heard most is the Cultural Revolution, where Chairman Mao incited a rebellion against the state he ostensibly led, with the Great Leap Forward (rapid economic transformation through absurd magical thinking) as a close second. Mao does not exhaust the field, however. There is a rich vein of ironic parallels to be found in the career of Mikhail Gorbachev. Here I am drawing on Vladislav M. Zubok’s Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union, which I discussed at greater length here.
There are any number of parallels that immediately leap to mind — such as their strange trust in their country’s historical enemies (Reagan for Gorbachev, Putin for Trump), their tendency to indulge in personal projects instead of governing (writing Marxist theory for Gorbachev, golfing for Trump) or even the fact that both have a bizarre visual feature on their head (the birthmark and the combover, respectively).
More informative, though, are the parallel dynamics of their careers. The first is that both shocked the political establishment with their radicalism. In both cases, establishment figures assumed they would be a fresh outsider face (Trump as a political novice, Gorbachev as the first Soviet leader born after the Russian Revolution) who could be controlled. In fact, in the case of Gorbachev it was likely that the need to control him didn’t even occur to most of the relevant power brokers, since he had previously been such a “go along to get along” kind of guy. But both Gorbachev and Trump 2.0 moved much faster and made much bigger changes than anyone was anticipating. In Gorbachev’s case, the establishment was too blindsided to do much of anything prior to the abortive coup attempt (famous for the Soviet TV station’s decision to play Swan Lake on repeat for the duration rather than report on events), and this time around it doesn’t seem like much of anyone with institutional power is making serious plans to counter Trump.
The nature of those rapid changes also bears comparison. Perhaps most notably, Gorbachev’s decision to simply leave the Eastern Bloc countries to their own devices was as shocking to Soviet insiders as Trump’s omni-trade war has been to their American counterparts. This decision is representative of a broader trend — their rapid changes tended to be strangely self-undermining. Gorbachev seems to have believed he would gain some moral authority and shed an economic burden by abandoning the Warsaw Pact, just as Trump claims to be righting a major wrong in the world trade system by fighting back against our allies’ supposed parasitism. In practice, though, both moves seriously undercut the sources of the respective superpower’s sway on global events.
The same was true domestically. Gorbachev styled himself as a new Lenin, instituting a renewed revolution to fully actualize socialism in its ideal form — including an eventual transition to democracy. Ironically, though, he ruled more purely dictatorially than most post-Stalin Soviet leaders, even as he continually undercut the sources of his own power. Key to his plan to democratize the Soviet Union was the ambition of reenvigorating the individual republics and their local “soviets” — moves that wound up stoking nationalistic fervor that had mostly lain dormant, which (shockingly!) proved to be counter to Gorbachev’s socialist goals. And though this analogy is admittedly a bit strained, both also made changes to the “official” history of their countries that hurt their legitimacy — Gorbachev by belatedly admitting the truth that the Baltic states had been annexed by force (morally good, tactically stupid) and Trump by hamfistedly imposing a white supremacist narrative to counter the scourge of “woke” (morally evil, also tactically stupid).
Similarly, the attempted reform of the Soviet economy took on a DOGE-like “move fast and break things” tone, as the few people who still had some idea how the planning system worked were sidelined and the functioning systems were gummed up. The attempt to make the constituent republics “real” again also had the effect of severely disrupting supply chains, similar to Trump’s antics. Contrary to the hagiography by which Gorbachev wisely oversaw the inevitable dissolution of the Soviet Union, the events of his rule were chaotic and unpredictable to almost everyone involved, due to the unique combination of naivety and recklessness he brought to the table.
In summary, both were aspiring revolutionary dictators, aiming to revive an idealized heroic national past, and both relentlessly destroyed the state capacity necessary to carry out their stated goals. Both responded to economic discontent by heedlessly making things even worse. Both abandoned allies and cozied up to long-time enemies who did not actually have their nation’s interests at heart.
Where the parallel begins to break down is that Gorbachev’s intentional stoking of intra-Union nationalism wound up creating independent power centers that ultimately dissolved his country out from under him. A few months into the Trump administration, we don’t seem to be very far down that road — though arbitrarily witholding federal funding to “blue” states could do for state-level identification what Trump’s abominable threats have done to Canadian nationalism. Maybe Gavin Newsom will turn out to be America’s Boris Yeltsin, withdrawing the single biggest constituent unit from a tottering federal structure (though of course California is proportionally nowhere near as dominant as the Russian “Republic” was within the USSR).
And of course, for most Western readers, the parallel rankles because Trump is bad and Gorbachev was good. Personally, I’m not so sure that dissolving a major world power, permanently racheting down the life prospects of everyone in the successor nations, and abandoning a major region of the world to what amounts to mafia rule was an unalloyed good. If the choice were between the continued existence of the USSR and the constituent republics becoming nice, normal, prosperous liberal democracies, obviously the latter outcome holds considerable appeal — but it is not remotely what happened, nor is there really any reason to imagine that option was on the table. Meanwhile, judging from the early days of Trump’s second term, the world may well regard the dissolution of the United States with relief by the time he’s done.
If that sounds impossible to you, well, the dissolution of the Soviet Union would have sounded impossible to everyone in the early 80s — from Gorbachev and Reagan all the way on down. A superpower doesn’t just destroy itself! That would be crazy! But sometimes crazy things happen. We unfortunately seem to be living through one example — hence the value of thinking through a previous case.
[Editor’s note: While preparing for my frequent course “Deals With the Devil,” which centers on the Faust theme, I discovered that one of my favorite filmmakers, Éric Rohmer, wrote a doctoral dissertation on F.W. Murnau’s silent filmFaust. To force myself to read it, I put it on my syllabus, hoping that it would set up an exercise where my students could build connections between the Faust theme and a major work not obviously based upon it, in this case, My Night at Maud’s. As you will see, it turned out that much of the material in the book was not directly relevant to the course, but Rohmer does have some good stray observations about Murnau’s reworking of the Faust theme and his relationship to Goethe in particular. I share the text of the handout I will be distributing to my class in case anyone might find it interesting or useful. My translated excerpts below are drawn from Éric Rohmer, L’organisation de l’espace dans le Faust de Murnau (Paris: Union Générale d’Editions, 1977). Page numbers refer to this edition.]
Éric Rohmer (1920-2010) was a French filmmaker associated with the New Wave movement pioneered by directors like Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut. Like Godard and Truffaut, Rohmer actually started out as a film critic and scholar, and he did his doctoral dissertation on Murnau’s silent film adaptation of Faust (1926). As a film critic and aspiring filmmaker himself, Rohmer is much less interested in the plot of the film than in Murnau’s cinematic technique. In fact, he believes that the familiarity of the plot was what allowed Murnau to be so innovative in the way he presented it—all his attention was focused on technique rather than narrative. Nevertheless, Rohmer does make some very insightful remarks about how the film functions as an adaptation of Goethe’s Faust. Here I will provide an overview of Rohmer’s work and a translation of those passages. My hope is that this will help us to make connections between the Faust theme and Rohmer’s film My Night at Maud’s (1969).
Rohmer opens the book with the claim that “Of all filmmakers, F.W. Murnau is perhaps the one who knew how to organize the space of his films in the most rigorous and inventive way” (9). He defines three different kinds of space that a film can create. The first is the pictorial space, which talks about the way that individual shots or frames are composed. The second is architectural space, which refers to the way a film creates the illusion of a “real world” that the characters are moving through. The third is filmic space, which refers to the way that the film creates a sensation of movement.
The main chapters of the book go through these versions of space one by one. In the first chapter, on pictorial space, Rohmer claims that most filmmakers of Murnau’s time were inspired by photography, but Murnau preferred to use painting as a model. Rohmer goes through many individual painters he believes inspired Murnau’s broad style, including Rembrandt, Caravaggio, and Vermeer. He also mentions several specific paintings that he sees as models for particular scenes and refers, in broader terms, to the way that illustrations of Goethe’s Faust may have influenced him as well. This chapter basically does not discuss the plot at all and hence does not include any substantial passages relevant to our class discussion.
In the second chapter, on architectural space, Rohmer does a detailed study of the layout and décor of the various spaces that appear in the film. This chapter includes some analysis that is so detailed that it may border on the insane—for instance, at one point he provides a chart listing and categorizing every single object that appears on screen (80-82). He also includes sketches where he tries to reconstruct the layout of Faust’s study (67), Gretchen’s house (71), and Martha’s house (72). More relevant to our discussion is his inventory of the scenes from Goethe that Murnau excluded or modified, which leads to an analysis of Mephistopheles as a character:
Now let us precisely determine, while examining each scene in detail, the places that are in Goethe and those that have been modified. Auerbach’s tavern disappears, but it is in a tavern that we see Mephistopheles provoke Valentine and engage in a feat of sorcery, here more terrifying than burlesque: the flame shooting out of the wine. If the character of Mephistopheles retains all the comic force of his literary model (without going beyond it, except perhaps in Martha’s house), Murnau wanted, however, to preserve the seriousness of the wonders he shows us, whereas Goethe tinged the legacy of the Volksbuch [a term for the original Faust legend] with derision. The demon is not presented to us, as in the play, in the form of a poodle; it is Faust himself who evokes him, just as in the legend; and the sinister monk who emerges, though sarcastic, cannot provoke in us the slightest chuckle. Murnau will equally avoid showing us the gallery of animals that is the witch’s kitchen (Hexenküche); it is in his study that Faust’s rejuvination is carried out. Walpurgis Night, which inspired painters and musicians, has also disappeared, but I do not see how a cinematographic translation of that satiric-philosophical interlude could be given, except in a spirit of Goya-esque masquerade, which is quite far from Murnau. (60-61)
Rohmer then takes a step back to think about Murnau’s relationship to Goethe more broadly:
If Murnau and Kyser [the writer of the screenplay] ultimately remain so faithful to Goethe, despite their apparent desire to distance themselves from him and return to the sources of the myth (“an old German legend,” as the credits say), it is perhaps also the case that the play carried the seed of its cinematographic transcription. It is true that the settings of the scenes, in this philosophical drama that was made above all to be read, even if they do not play a truly active role, assert their presence more forcefully than in many works better conceived for staging: that of Shakespeare, for example, or the Greek tragedies. The “tragedy” of Faust is indeed more cinematographic than theatrical, in its first and second parts. We never find in it a banal waiting room, an anonymous place, but always a well-defined place, which makes up an integral part of the old myth and of what Goethe himself forged, in the same way as the names of characters or the epoch when the story unfolds—which no one would dare change. (61)
Later in the chapter, after his reconstruction of the various sets and his listing of all the objects, Rohmer reflects further on the idea that everything in the film has a very defined purpose:
In Murnau, the same thing holds for clothing as for objects: it is never a means, a tool, a weapon for getting what one wants or seducing someone. We are in a world made of relationships of force, not of persuasion. Not of a lover’s courtship: the woman does not play the flirt, the man does not play the rake. In this universe of pure desire, there is room only for predator and prey: whether he uses the fascination of his looks or pure violence, it is all the same. Each being is for the other a vampire or a victim. Each knows what he is after from his counterpart, or what he fears. Deception is impossible. There is no need to strut about: one passes immediately to action, which is to say to assault or its simulation. The love scenes are conceived as battles where now the man, now the woman is attacking or attacked, pursuing or pursued. Thus, for example, the scene in Martha’s garden… (86).
This concreteness holds especially for costumes:
To a change in clothing there almost always corresponds a profound transformation of one’s being, and Faust, with its theme of rejuvenation, puts out in the open a theme that is elsewhere latent [in Murnau’s other films]. Moreover, the transition is not forcefully abrupt. It would be more fair to speak sometimes of blossoming or blooming. In the famous scene with the jewelry, reduced by the filmmaker to a simple necklace, or in the one where Valentin offers a shawl to his sister, the two faces of Gretchen are revealed, today a reserved young girl, tomorrow a woman and a lover. The fact of wearing such and such clothes is not for Murnau a social act, but a natural phenomenon of evolution, of growth or decline. (87-88)
In the third and final chapter, Murnau analyzes the idea of filmic space or the creation of motion. Here he emphasizes Murnau’s use of sudden appearances, which leads to another massive table listing and categorizing every example (96ff.). This chapter also includes a long section where he provides multiple abstract sketches of different scenes to trace the direction of the main movements (125ff.). He discusses the overall pattern of motion in the film as a kind of strategy, which is sometimes apparently violated by the actors. In this context, he talks about individual performances, particularly those of Emil Jannings (Mephistopheles), Yvette Guilbert (Martha), and Camilla Horn (Gretchen):
Certainly one can say that Emil Jannings and Yvette Guilbert “go too far.” It is certain that the gestures of these two actors, especially in the scene where they meet, appear indifferent to the general dynamic of the film’s strategy. They are gestures that bear a significance without reference to the global conception of the mise en scène. Their direction owes nothing to their inscription in the space of the film… But one must not confuse the direction of the film and what is proper to each filmed element…. This mode of expression is the responsibility of the characters…. It is not Yvette Guilbert, nor Jannings who “goes too far,” but Martha and Mephistopheles…. This comic verve, though due in part to the personal rapport of the actors and though apparently foreign to the general spirit of the mise en scène, is ultimately integrated successfully into the film’s modelling and its motor scheme….
By opposite means, Murnau obtains with an unknown, Camilla Horn, in the role of Gretchen, the same result…. Did he lead his actress to find some of these poses and gestures herself, or did he suggest them right from the start? It is of little importance whether he uses one or the other method. The fact is that he succeeded there as well in perfectly marrying what came from him and what he owed to the actress, giving us the impression of cutting her to the quick, of forging a new being who would be, from birth, “Murnauian”… This second nature which she is granted renders her always absolutely “natural.” (108-110)
In the footnotes to this chapter, Rohmer also returns to the notion that the Faust legend is more intrinsically cinematic than theatrical. Here he quotes Goethe’s version of the wager, where Faust defies Mephistopheles to give him happiness so great that he will declare, “Beautiful moment, please do not pass away”:
It is an idea more cinematographic than theatrical, because tragic theater, whether Greek or Shakespearean, puts the accent on the impossibility of innocence, not of happiness, having in view action rather than contemplation. The feeling of the incompleteness of the moment, associated with that of is fullness, we find in a vague way in almost all films, in the guise, most often, of a “sentimental” optimism, in search of one of those “suspensions”… that the screen is well suited to achieve by its magic and that of the soundtrack. In this sense, the “happy ending” of Murnau’s Faust appears to be more in line with the typical mythology of the cinema than with the ambiguous conclusions of the first and second parts of Goethe’s Faust. (123)
There are a number of candidates for “the book that predicted Trump,” from Octavia Butler’s eerily prescient near-future dystopia that purported to “Make America Great Again” to Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind. I have occasionally quipped that Creepiness is the book that truly deserves the title. There is a moment of truth there — I do argue that the creepiness trend was in large part about the breakdown of white masculinity — but it was mostly just a joke about the almost overwhelming creepiness of Trump himself. More recently, though, it has dawned on me that another book in the series may deserve some prophetic credit, namely Why We Love Sociopaths. Or rather, it seems to have initially dawned on Aaron Bady, who tweeted about it a few times, and that prompted me to realize that Trump fits my cultural diagnosis in that book in a way that is, dare I say it, almost creepy.
My argument in Why We Love Sociopaths is that the remarkable prevelance of sociopathic characters in 2000s television was a symptom of a broken cultural contract. With the decline of the Fordist order and the rise of neoliberalism, one long-standing narrative about social mobility and merit had been discarded without being replaced by a plausible alternative. This situation gave rise to a growing sense that the only reliable means to get ahead in the system is to cheat. Certainly we can read Trump 2.0, and especially the seeming public indifference to his flagrant violation of laws and constitutional structures, as an extreme outgrowth of that basic tendency.
I organized my account around three types of sociopaths, all of which seem in retrospect to capture the Trump phenomenon in some way. The first category was the Schemer, which I mainly associated with cartoon shows where the characters are attempting to get away with mischief for its own sake. My key example was Eric Cartman from South Park, the strangely charismatic and resourceful child who periodically comes close to taking over the United States and even the world. Though Trump obviously lacks Cartman’s discipline and focus, there is something of the childish schemer in Trump — though that element is less prevalent in the embittered end-state we are now witnessing.
The second was the Climber, who stops at nothing to climb the social ladder. My key examples here was Don Draper from Mad Men. Here the connection to Trump is admittedly more distant, since my analysis was focused on meritocrats of the Obama type, who I argue should not be counted on to challenge the basic terms of the system that enabled their rise. Yet I do start out with an analysis of reality television, which I present as a “dumbed-down” version of the same basic worldview we see in prestige dramas like Mad Men and The Wire, and so I want to claim partial credit due to Trump’s association with reality TV.
The final sociopathic archetype was the Enforcer, the lawman who breaks the law in order to save it. My key example here was Jack Bauer of 24, who murders and tortures his way to stopping terrorist attacks that only see seems to have the insight to predict. Trump himself has identified unambiguously with this category, in his infamous quote (attributed to Napoleon) claiming that it is impossible to violate the law in service of your country. Clearly he is counting on his fellow citizens to decide that it doesn’t matter if he follows the legal niceties as long as he gets things done — nor is there any way to deny that the system as constituted on January 19, 2024, was basically incapable of delivering any meaningful results in a way that would be legible to the public.
Not only does Trump fit, in some way, into all of these categories, but his appeal depends on his ability to pivot among them. His status as a Cartman-esque provocateur gives people license to dismiss his scarier or more nonsensical declarations as mere bluster; his reputation as a (sort of) self-made businessman is key to his appeal; and his promise to “get things done” by any means necessary both emboldens his supporters and cows his enemies into submission. You can’t hold all three of these images together simultaneously, but they often combine in a kind of one-two punch. Cartman Trump seems most useful for such strategies. For instance, the existence of Climber Trump allows people to use the Cartman Trump to dismiss his destructive economic plans as bluster, while the frightening ambitions of Jack Bauer Trump can be rendered more palatable by reference to Cartman Trump. But on the less jovial side, it is precisely the Climber Trump that renders him plausible to many as a Jack Bauer figure who won’t be beholden to political restraints.
While in my conclusion I do offer up the feeble hope that, in a broken system, we might all benefit from being more sociopathic — a counterintuitive soundbite that was for a time picked up by Slavoj Žižek in his public lectures — my overall assessment of this trend is negative. It does offer a diagnostic of our broken system, sometimes even (in the case of The Wire in particular) a remarkably insightful one, and I admit up front that I enjoyed many of these shows (including South Park and some reality TV).
But its dominance of the entertainment field was, I believed, socially corrosive, and I think events have proven me correct. Trump 2.0 is not just politics as entertainment, which is bad enough, but it’s politics as 2000s entertainment, it’s politics as designed by people who watched way too much South Park, 24, and reality TV. I’m not making this up. Literal Republicans say as much, about themselves. Ross Douthat wrote a famous column on the rise of “South Park Republicans,” motivated primarily by a brash anti-PC attitude rather than any positive ideology. Supreme Court Justice Scalia — supposedly “the smart one” — literally cited 24 in an opinion, and the current conservative supermajority are all intellectual heirs of Scalia. As for the influence of reality TV, Trump’s trajectory speaks for itself, and clearly neither J.D. Vance nor any of Trump 2.0’s luminaries are “here to make friends.”
Obviously sociopath TV is not the only cause of Trump — nor am I saying as much. I’m saying the trend itself arose as a symptom of social breakdown, which it then helped to exacerbate. The one thing my diagnosis excludes is social media, for which I can perhaps be forgiven since I was writing in 2012 (and the book was after all about TV). But I think that many of the attitudes inculcated by South Park, reality TV, and 24 — the reflexive anti-PC “provocativeness,” the endless zero-sum competition for “clout,” and the ambient menace of violent fantasies — have shaped the social media field as well.
I’m not sure how much credit I really deserve for this prediction, since the fact of having written the book didn’t help me to predict either Trump’s success in the primaries nor his Electoral College technicality. But then, like most sane people, I had not up till that point given Donald Trump — who was little more than a vapid media phenomenon — much thought. If I had, perhaps I would have seen how well the cultural trends I diagnosed in Sociopaths converged in him. The cost, though, is that I would have squandered some of those precious remaining years and months before I was forced to spend so much of my time and energy thinking about one of the most worthless human beings ever to live. I stand behind that trade-off, even if I had no way of knowing I was making it. And if it turns out that my little book about TV trends, properly contextualized, could have prevented Trump’s rise — all I can do is apologize.
From mid-April to early May we’ll be hosting the next AUFS book event on Rajbir Singh Judge’s recent book Prophetic Maharaja: Loss, Sovereignty and the Sikh Tradition in Colonial South Asia. Rajbir is Assistant Professor in History at California State University, Long Beach, and the book explores loss and the limits of history by considering Maharaja Duleep Singh and his struggle during the 1880s to reestablish Sikh rule, the lost Khalsa Raj, in Punjab. Do get your own copy of the book and join us to talk about it. The event is currently scheduled to run as follows:
This is the text of an address I (Marika) gave recently as part of the KULeuven annual Thomas Feast on the theme of theology, art, and decolonisation.
For several years now I’ve been haunted by a piece by Étienne Balibar about the relationship between politics and knowledge in the university. Balibar wrote that, ‘We realise now that our ruling class is no longer a bourgeoisie in the historical sense of the world. It does not have a project of intellectual hegemony, nor an artistic point of honour. It needs (or so it thinks) only cost-benefit analyses, ‘cognitive’ educational programs, and committees of experts. That is why, with the help of the pandemic and the internet revolution, the same ruling class is preparing the demise of the social sciences, humanities, and even the theoretical sciences. To accelerate the process, why not have the victim become the culprit (‘Islamo-leftist’, ‘activism’, ‘ideology’…)? It will make things easier.’[1]
It’s a strange time to be reflecting on the relationship between theology, art and decolonisation, as both theology and the arts are struggling for survival in a global war waged ‘on wokeness’ – which is to say, on the side of white supremacy. When things that we love – or that we depend on for our salaries, stipends, or future job prospects – are threatened, it can be tempting simply to knuckle down, to try to cling to what we still have for as long as we can. But I want to suggest that we take our cue from Cedric Robinson, who writes in Black Marxism that his goal in writing the book was not simply ‘a question of outrage or concern for Black survival’ but ‘a matter of comprehension.’[2] How can we understand the relationship between theology, art, and empire?
Two things are often missing from contemporary attempts to grapple with this question, which are frequently both too abstract and not abstract enough. Our conversations often get stuck at the level of theological and artistic content – questions of who or what is represented or talked about. What this misses is both the very particular and material question of the institutions and resources which make theological and artistic expression possible, and then the more abstract question of theological and artistic form. So I want to spend some time sketching out some thoughts on these two areas.
Both the arts and academic theology in the Western world take their shape in large part from the huge social transformations which took place within Europe over the late medieval and early modern period along with the emergence of slavery, colonialism, and racism. I’m going to focus here on the role of universities, both because that’s what I know most intimately and because that’s where we currently are, but the other institutions on which theology and the arts rely – churches, galleries, concert halls, philanthropic and government funding bodies – were also transformed with or emerged out of these same processes. Universities were born from Christian Europe’s encounters with its others, out of the wealth of cultural, scientific, and philosophical materials which became available in the wake of the fracturing of Andalusia; out of European encounters with the Arab and Ottoman worlds through the Crusades; and from the age of European discovery, conquest, and slavery. They emerged in ways which reflected the needs of growing European nations for clerical and economic administration of emergent European nation states and empires, for legal and theological justifications for new forms of property and dispossession and, connected to all of this, for new frameworks of nation, race and history within which all of these could take place; frameworks created and sustained by theology, art, and culture.
I’ve come to think that theology, art, and the institutions in which these are done, can be best understood in terms of social reproduction. For the most part, that is, theology and the arts tend to function both to repeat and to re-inscribe the hierarchical ordering of the societies which produce them, along with the spiritual and aesthetic values which sustain these hierarchies; and also to rework these values as the societies which they organise encounter new challenges. As Sylvia Wynter suggests, we see within the Western world a gradual shift from ideas about racial hierarchy which were justified in the late medieval period on theological grounds, to a justification of racial order through reason – the predominant frame of the 16th through to the 18th centuries – followed by a hierarchy in which evolutionary and economic success come to measure eugenic perfection from the 19th century onwards; the belief that economic success indicates not only intelligence but also racial superiority.[3]
Universities exist both to reproduce the forms of knowledge which justify and re-make interconnected distinctions of race, class, and gender and also to reproduce the people who will in turn re-make the world which relies on these distinctions. The crisis we find ourselves in, then, can be understood as the result of the ongoing shifts by which racial and colonial order remake themselves. The second part of the twentieth century can perhaps best be grasped through the framework of neo-colonialism globally and multiracialism in the imperial core: a form of racial order in which, as Denise Ferreira da Silva argues, white Westerners invite non-white people to enter into the supposedly secular sphere of universal values and human rights, both failing to recognise the particularity of our own sense of what is universally human, and relying implicitly on the figure of the inhuman, fanatical or unassimilable other: the barbaric and homophobic Hamas fighter; the misogynistic, violent, immigrant; the drug addicted and welfare-dependent black mother.
Much of what passes for decolonisation in this period, then, can be better described as diversification. The West allows for formal desegregation and decolonisation, welcoming diversity into its ranks precisely in order to maintain its imperial power. We see this reflected in the paradoxes of contemporary theological and artistic institutions: the galleries showing work by black artists with the help of funding from oil companies; universities who refuse to take down statues honouring slave-owners whilst advertising their diversity schemes, running workshops on decolonising the curriculum next door to departments partnering with arms companies; or working to widen access whilst closing off our students’ future possibilities by delivering them into debt. This conjuncture has created challenges for those of us seeking to confront the historical entanglement of theology and the arts with racism and colonial violence. The university is asking us to talk about these things, but not too much; as Fred Moten and Stefano Harney wrote twelve years ago of the subversive intellectual: ‘the university needs what she bears but cannot bear what she brings.[4]’
And of course, all too often we choose not to confront our institutions but to hold back; to limit what we say and do for the sake of our jobs, our connections, or our future employment prospects. To live in the university is to be formed by its systems and structures in ways that I do not think we are very good at reckoning with, and so it is often our undergraduate students who are able to see with the clearest eyes and speak with the bravest voices. I think we’ve seen very clearly in the wake of October 7th the limits of the neoliberal university’s commitment to decolonisation. The violence with which universities have shut down even the mildest demands for disinvestment from the machinery of destruction throughout the ongoing genocide of Palestinians has been revealing. I wonder whether we will look back on these protests as a turning point: the absolute failure of liberal institutions to defend free speech, the capitulation to pressure from donors and governments perhaps the death knell for the Western commitment to the multicultural ideals of diversity, equality and inclusion; and perhaps for the university as such.
What comes next of course, looks to be worse. What does it mean to confront the possibility that, as Balibar suggests the golden age of the university is over? The destruction of the university may look like what is currently taking place in the US, where an attempt is underway to systematically dismantle both universities and the arts, or in the UK, where instead of the wrecking ball of Elon Musk’s DOGE, a purportedly left wing government is overseeing the gradual death by starvation of both the university and the arts sectors. What does it mean to recognise that these changes are happening not, whatever politicians, consultants, or vice chancellors claim, out of economic necessity, but out of a groundless insistence, a kind of pure faith in the superfluity of the arts and humanities?
Let’s talk about abstraction. Jacob Taubes suggests that the fundamental shift which takes place between the medieval and the modern world can be understood, if not explained, in terms of the shift from Ptolemaic to Copernican cosmology.[5] Medieval Europeans understood themselves as part of the great chain of being, a cosmic order reflected not just in the ranked ordering of humans and other creatures but in the very universe itself, a hierarchy both literal and figurative leading from the chthonic darkness below the earth up to the celestial spheres and the heavenly beings.[6] This cosmic and metaphysical order gave both theology and art a firm anchor in the universe.
To speak of God, to make art, was to reflect an order of goodness, truth and beauty in which what was said and done on earth corresponded in a very real sense to what was done in heaven. The Catholic Church was right, Taubes says, to see in Copernicus not just a new scientific theory but an existential threat to the metaphysics which grounded both ecclesial authority and artistic representation. After Copernicus, unable to ground spiritual or ecclesial authority in the external order of the universe, Taubes suggests, both philosophy and theology turned inwards: a shift which we see both in the Kantian turn to human categories and in the ongoing struggle of Christian theology to reconcile the now antithetical poles of God and human being.
This turn inwards is reflected too, I want to suggest, in an inwards turn which we can see in both Catholic and Protestant piety: a new emphasis on inwardness, on intention over action, on self-examination; a proliferation of new mysticisms of internal ascent leading not from heaven to earth but up the stairways of the interior castle to the darkness of God. But art, too, is unmoored, and comes to find its bearings within the individual mind and imagination. Stephen Prickett connects this process both to the spread of literacy and the newly emergent European divide between the public and the private spheres, suggesting that this internalisation of imagination and speculation is seen first in the newly emergent art form of the novel, but appears also in the visual arts and in poetry in tendencies towards realism, idealism, and perspectivalism.[7] Along similar lines, Victoria Nelson has traced the transposition of ancient ideas about underworlds into what she calls ‘psychotopography’, the literary and visual depiction of the underworld as an image of the inner depths of the mind and imagination; an allegorical rather than analogically artistic vision which, she argues, shapes the emergence of the grotesque, the fantastical, and the science fictional in artistic representations in the West.[8]
But these transformations are also racial transformations. As Willie Jennings writes, the emergence of racial slavery and European empire is characterised by a forcible deracination of enslaved and colonised people; the destruction of their relationships with one another and with their particular places and contexts in order to place them instead within a racial scale which runs not from heaven to hell but from white to black.[9] This racial logic is also a logic of property. Enslaved people, Jennings argues, are relocated both into Christian identity and also into ‘the market’. New European notions of the interior self are themselves tied to new orders of property. Balibar finds in John Locke the first full expression of the notion of self-consciousness; a notion which, he suggests, cannot be separated from Locke’s understanding of personhood as property.[10] It’s the opening up of inner space which makes it possible for Locke to understand personhood as self-possession, and this relationship of self-possession which in turn opens up new forms of possessive relation to the external world. It is this understanding of personhood which allows Locke to claim ownership not only of the ore dug up by his own hands, but also of the grass that his horse has eaten, and the turf cut by his servant. It is this interiority, this self-possession which, Brenna Bhandar and Alberto Toscano argue, smuggles ‘a racial anthropology of the human’ into the very heart of Western ideas of personhood, the self-conscious, rational, imaginative and self-possessed person contrasted with racialised non-persons, understood to be lacking in self-consciousness, irrational, and trapped outside of history in the realm of nature.[11]
The racial frame within which this new interiority is mapped is also a historical frame, an account of progress in which the gradual abstraction and spiritualisation of all things which was once worked out along the great chain of being comes now to be mapped across a historical scale. Here theology is placed as one stage along a developmental scheme within which, in its classical form, the pagan deification of nature gives way to the outward law of Jewish monotheism, then the inward law of Christianity, and finally the spiritualisation or internalisation of theology’s claims; the realisation that it is not God but reason which drives forward history.
A similar process of interiorisation and abstraction is at work in narratives of the development of art over history. The novel is placed towards the end of a process of development which begins in myth and fable.[12] What is modernity if not Don Quixote, awakening from a dream of chivalry and romance to discover himself, the protagonist of a work of fiction? The modern art gallery removes works of art from religious, ritual or social function and places them into a blank white box. Something similar can be said of the museum, which marks its difference from the gallery precisely by placing the works it holds into context, thus marking them out from art works proper, at the same time as it insist on the relegation of these contexts to the past. Recent conflicts over the fate of the Benin bronzes, for example, looted by British soldiers from Nigeria, have included contention both over the appropriateness of displaying the bronzes as separate works, rather than within the altars for which they were originally made, and also over the practice of removing them from the daily life of the communities from which they were stolen.[13]
In Black Marxism, Cedric Robinson says that his work began from the recognition that the theories of history which he encountered in Western radicalism were insufficient; that ‘something more than objective material forces were responsible for “the nastiness”’. But this need to understand was ‘not simply a question of outrage or concern for Black survival. It was a matter of comprehension.’ We are talking, then, about a double excess; two forms of desire, of pleasure, connected to the acquisition of knowledge. One thing that has happened with the shift from formal and explicit logic of segregation and empire to the less tangible and explicit order of neoliberal multiculturalism has been a shift towards the language of culture and religion as a justification for racial violence under the banner of the threat to Europe’s Christian heritage, or the decline of Western culture.
This shift implicates both theology and the arts more deeply, at the same time as it has heightened the attacks on both insofar as they have resisted these attempts to weaponise them. I wonder whether this has to do with the ambivalent role of pleasure which is more explicit here than in the sciences, precisely because both theology and the art deal with that which is not quite graspable or containable; precisely because both open up the space to confront what cannot quite be contained within the logic of racial order, alongside the pleasures which sustain it. Both theology and art have to do both with beauty and with suffering, and with the slippage between the two. Both know how to redeem the suffering of others, how to turn it into profit. The cost of interiorization and abstraction is sometimes described as ‘disenchantment’; the reward of centuries of violence and dispossession has been, for both art and theology, a certain kind of crisis of confidence, a loss of faith in the reality or value of what we do. What certain kinds of theological or artistic diversity work have in common with the violence of reactionary politics unfolding around the world is perhaps a need to witness certain kinds of suffering in order to restore a sense of reality or urgency or pleasure to the world. What is the difference between a White House video of immigrants being deported to Guantanamo and the keffiyeh-wrapped baby Jesus in the Vatican nativity scene?[14] In Heidelberg, recently, I went to an exhibition about the history of Orientalism in German art. I found myself in a room full of people looking at racist art, wondering whether we were there to enjoy the racist art, or to enjoy feeling superior to the people who made the racist art, or to enjoy feeling bad about being part of a society that had made so much racist art. What is coming for us now, I think, is a movement of reaction which both feeds on the pleasure of racial violence and very much does not want to think about those pleasures. Perhaps that is a place for us to start.
[2] Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism (The University of North Carolina Press, 2000).
[3] ‘Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation – An Argument’ in CR: The New Centennial Review 3.1 (2003), 257-2337.
[4]The Undercommons: Fugutive Planning & Black Study (Minor Compositions, 2013).
[5] Jacob Taubes, ‘Dialectic and Analogy’ in The Journal of Religion 34.2 (1954), 111-119.
[6] Cecilio M. Cooper, ‘Fallen: Generation, Postlapsarian Verticality + the Black Chthonic’ in Rhizomes 38 (2022).
[7] Stephen Prickett, Secret Selves: A History of Our Inner Space (Bloomsbury, 2021).
[8] Victoria Nelson, The Secret Life of Puppets (Harvard University Press, 2001).
[9] Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (Yale University Press, 2010).
[10] Étienne Balibar, Identity and Difference: John Locke and the Invention of Consciousness, translated by Warren Montag (Verso, 2013).
[11] Brenna Bhandar and Alberto Toscano, ‘Race, real estate and real abstraction’ in Radical Philosophy 194 (2015).
[12] Atesede Makonnen, ‘Romanticism and the Novel(ty) of Race in Manu Samriti Chander, The Cambridge Companion to Romanticism and Race (Cambridge University Press, 2024.
[13] Barnaby Phillips, Loot: Britain and the Benin Bronzes (Oneworld, 2021).
On our flight home from Rome, we hit some turbulence — the borderline scary kind that turns your stomach and elicits the occasional gasp. I am a pretty seasoned traveller, so it would take much more than that to make me really fear for my safety. But my mind did wander: what if this was the end? And I thought about my improbably good life: a wonderful partner, a job that lets me genuinely contribute to society while challenging myself intellectually, a beautiful highrise apartment in a city we love, a lifestyle that accomodates frequent international travel…. It would be a shame not to get as much of this life as we could, but if a freak accident cuts it short, we have at least been living the life we want. My Esteemed Partner, happily engrossed in her movie, was apparently even less affected by the turbulence than me, but I imagined that if it really was a serious situation and she really was scared and upset, sharing thoughts along these lines with her might bring some comfort — maybe even some peace.
I sat with this line of thought for a few moments, savoring my sense of calm and equanimity. And then I thought: “Am I okay?” Is it normal for a person in the prime of life to be so comfortable with the thought of premature death? Is this a sign of wisdom and maturity, or of despair? Reflecting on this experience several times over the past few months, I have not been able to settle on an answer to that question. But what has become clear is that it was not about death as such, or at least not entirely: it was about Trump, the one force on earth that seems somehow even more inescapable than death.
Part of why I could imagine that flight home as the end is that we had joked, and maybe more than joked, about that trip being our last for the foreseeable future. The fears that motivated that speculation seemed distant and outlandish at the time — maybe My Esteeemed Partner, whose passport expires in a couple years, would not be able to renew it for some reason; maybe we would come to understand that we wouldn’t be guaranteed reentry if we left the country.
Now those fears seem somehow more realistic, not because of anything concrete that has happened in connection to the Trump administration’s policy on travel, but simply because everything feels like it’s up for grabs. I know that there’s always someone willing to claim they were the one voice in the wilderness that no one would listen to, but surely no one could have predicted how arbitrary and far-reaching the damage would be. Did Trump campaign on, for instance, suspending all medical research grants indefinitely? Did anyone really understand that he was going to hand the keys to Musk and completely ignore the Congressional appropriations process? Did anyone think the president would be openly musing about picking and choosing which government debts he regarded as binding?
And yet I still live my life, basically unaffected so far except for some mild anxiety about whether I will actually receive my tax refund. In fact, things are going well. I’ve been promoted, at long last, to associate professor, and though the Shimer faculty was not given the opportunity to gain tenure status, we have at least achieved some formal job security after many years of uncertainty. I’m enjoying my teaching this year — which is a good mix of familiar courses and challenging new material — and I’m happy to be serving my colleagues as chair of a major standing committee within faculty governance. My book Late Star Trek is coming out in a few short weeks, and I’m working toward establishing my scholarly expertise in the Qur’an.
In short, everything is coming together — but I’m not 100% sure there will even be college next year. Most are interpreting the assaults on federal research funding as attacks on higher ed more broadly, and the entire sector is deeply, deeply dependent on federal funding. Would they get rid of Pell Grants? That would be fatal for many institutions. Getting rid of federal student loans would be fatal for nearly all. I find myself in the bargaining stage as to whether North Central is likely to be affected by each step. I can even imagine scenarios, albeit highly improbable ones, where the loss of student loans is somehow survivable. But such speculation requires at least some stable background, some comprehensible context — and I will admit that I cannot process what a total repudiation of higher ed by the federal government does to the enterprise of higher ed, much less one particular school.
More radical thoughts present themselves as I go through the bargaining stage. What if I lose my job? I have savings that can last me a good long while, even leaving aside My Esteemed Partner’s income. And even if we both find ourselves out of work, we could probably survive for many years at a tolerable level of comfort. But that presupposes things like the continued viability of banks, or the continued value of money, or the stability of the power grid, or the safety of the water. John Quiggin introduced some nightmare fuel over at Crooked Timber: what if Trump announces the convertibility of US dollars with cryptocurrency? As recently as five weeks ago, I would have laughed off the idea. I’m not laughing now.
And it’s like this for everything. Will there be a flu shot next year? Will there be a Post Office next year? Will air travel remain viable? Will we be bogged down in a counterinsurgency in Canada? Will we join the Russian Federation? I threw the last one in there to test whether there’s a limit of what seems possible, and I find that I can’t dismiss even that — not after Trump’s insane lies about Zelinskyy and the origins of the war in Ukraine!
For a long time, I have been encouraging people to consider whether George W. Bush was even worse than Trump, but in a few short weeks Trump has demolished my case. Bush was an evil president using the power of the state to do evil things. Trump has effectively abolished the state. We do not have laws. We do not have a government. We certainly don’t have a Congress and we barely have courts. But in an important sense, we also don’t have a president. We have the irritable whims of two billionaires, handling domestic and foreign policy, respectively, and we have a bunch of psychos in charge of more detailed policy portfolios. The goal is not to change public policy, but to render public policy impossible. The goal is not to transform American society, but to destroy it completely, to destroy everything that makes it possible to call this great and terrible nation a human society.
Everything is up for grabs, because there is no limit to how capricious and spiteful and short-sighted the people ostensibly “in charge” will allow themselves to be. There is no possibility of any positive outcome until they are removed from office and replaced by literally anybody else — even J.D. Vance, who at least lacks Trump’s demonic charisma and who certainly does not inspire the same kind of fear and pathetic self-abasement and hence might get some pushback from someone.
Yet we all live our lives, day to day, as though we still live in a society, as though promises mean something, as though it’s possible to tell the future more than a week in advance, as though there’s anything we can be sure they won’t take from us. And as I think about that, I can sometimes even work myself into a state of calm resignation where I can contemplate the possibility of my life becoming much different and worse due to circumstances beyond my control and conclude that I will survive and find ways to affect the world positively and maybe even still experience moments of satisfaction and joy. But there are other times where I read the latest headline and spontaneously think: I don’t want to live in this world anymore.
When I’m in that mood, sometimes I think back to that turbulence. The strange thing about being in a plane crash, at least to my mind, is that you are going to be falling — for the rest of your life. The sick roller coaster sensation — at least this is how I imagine it, though it’s presumably much worse — is what you are going to be experiencing for the rest of your life. With one major exception, of course! But maybe one is accepting of that outcome in a different way in an endless moment of perpetual falling than in a moment of abstract contemplation. Food for thought, certainly!
Am I okay? I don’t even know what that would mean under these circumstances. And I — a white, straight, monogamously partnered, property-owning male with a savings account — am certainly the least of anyone’s worries. All due respect to those who are being more directly victimized! But what I’m sure we can all agree on, regardless of privilege level, is: This can’t go on forever. It can’t even go on for four years. And yet it might go on for four years and maybe even longer. For some people, it will last — perhaps already has lasted — the whole rest of their lives.
Agamben is best known for his critique of sovereign emergency powers and their tendency to reduce all legal subjects to a homo sacer-like state of absolute exposure to violence. But in more recent years, he has written more often about a seemingly opposite, but actually deeply correlative problem: the attempt to legislate every area of life. On the political level, this means collapsing legitimacy (our sense of what the law should be and do) into legality. Whatever the law is, must be legitimate, simply because it is the law — meaning that the idea of legitimacy as a critical standpoint over against the law is lost. One can see this on the level of constitutional law in the United States, where establishing the Founder’s intent, or simply repeating the way the existing institutions function, often suffices to establish the legitimacy of a particular outcome, at least in the minds of many liberals.
The same dynamic holds at an interpersonal level. On the one hand, we have increasingly lost any sense of the distinction between the legal and the ethical. I think here of the frequently given advice that after a car accident, one should not apologize, because it would mean admitting fault and could put you at a legal disadvantage. In a sane society, though, a person who believes themselves to have caused serious harm to another should apologize — and the person receiving the apology should not seize on that natural human reaction to maximize their legal advantage. On the other hand, people increasingly seem to believe that their interpersonal relationships can and indeed must be structured according to strict contractual terms. This comes up especially in sexual contexts, where one might expect legal niceties to be out of place. I look at the vogue for polyamory, for instance, and wonder at people’s apparent belief that anyone can “promise” that their feelings won’t be hurt. We could say something similar for people’s love of inscribing themselves into ever more precise identity categories that come complete with their own list of demands — or for other’s apparent belief that merely being asked to acknowledge the existence of unfamiliar gender or sexual identities is an unjust imposition to which they did not consent.
For me, the distinction between legality and legitimacy — or, more vividly, between law and justice — is pretty foundational. This is, blessedly, not because of Schmitt’s book by that title, but because it was foundational for Ted Jennings’ teaching when I was in grad school. This was when he was working on his two career-capping works on Paul, Reading Derrida / Thinking Paul and Outlaw Justice. As is well known, Paul’s mission in life was to vindicate the full inclusion of non-Jewish or Gentile believers in the Jesus movement — without requiring them to fulfill the Jewish law. And he argues for this position theologically by taking a fairly extreme position: “works of the law” cannot be necessary to save the Gentiles, because they have never actually saved anyone. What is salvific is actually faith or trust in God, apart from any external work. Although he would probably resist this description, in both books Jennings “secularizes” Paul’s argument by claiming that he is pointing to a universal dynamic in the relationship between law and justice. Law always points beyond itself, toward the principle of justice, and that principle means that law can always be called into question. When law claims to be fully self-sufficient, it betrays itself and becomes a tool of injustice.
In those days, there were many clear examples of what happens when law is separated from justice. George W. Bush was president, having taken office with a minority vote after a deeply questionable Supreme Court decision. No one had won the Electoral College without winning the popular vote in over a century, and the Supreme Court had never intervened in an election case in such an overtly partisan way. But the Electoral College was technically the law, and the Supreme Court is the last court of appeal, so he took office. After 9/11 — somewhat contrary to Agamben’s analysis — Bush did not claim sweeping emergency powers so much as fashion himself “legal tools” to wage his War on Terror. New legal categories were invented (“enemy combatant”), loopholes relating to territoriality were exploited (Guantanamo and CIA black sites), and the use of military force was authoritized even if war was not declared (in either Afghanistan or Iraq). Most chillingly, the White House set teams of lawyers to work elaborating a legal basis for the use of torture.
Basically all of this is still on the books. The Authorization to Use Military Force against al Qaeda and its allies is still the law of the land. Obama took advantage of Bush-era laws and norms to run a drone strike program that even claimed the right to execute American citizens without due process. Bush’s torture memos, even if never used by later administrations, were never tested in court, and certainly none of the architects of the torture regime were ever prosecuted. And the normalization of the Electoral College technicality gave us Trump in 2016 — and almost provided him with a perfectly legal means to seize a second term against the popular will in 2020.
Meanwhile, Republicans have been weaponizing laws and rules in many other ways. The anti-abortion movement has routinely passed state laws that were known to be unconstitutional, for the express purpose of giving them a route to the Supreme Court in the hopes of chipping away at and eventually overturning Roe v. Wade. In Congress, they have exploited every rule and loophole — from the abuse of the fillibuster to McConnell’s refusal to even consider Obama’s last Supreme Court nominee. Less discussed have been their efforts to ratchet the balance of power in the House permanently to the right. By means of the Hastert Rule (named after a convicted child molestor, by the way), which mandates that no legislation can come to the floor unless it has a support of the majority of Republicans, laws that would have enjoyed majority support have been obstructed even more efficiently than with the Senate fillibuster.
Meanwhile, professing the sanctity of laws and norms, Democrats refuse to change the rules to take away Republicans’ illegitimate advantage — because they have no conceptual basis for calling it illegitimate. The rules are the rules, and changing them would be cheating. That goes even for a stolen Supreme Court, whose Democratic members insist must be respected even as it undoes all their priorities with a gleeful disdain for precedent or even normal legal procedure — many of the biggest recent decisions should have been dismissed because the plaintiff lacked standing. But again, the rules are the rules, and all Democrats can do is grin and bear it.
We may be seeming to enter a new phase with the total brazen lawlessness of Trump 2.0. But I think it is, instead, the natural next step in the dialectic. Law shorn of legitimacy is already a kind of force, an inert brute fact — and so it should not surprise us that it eventually gives way to overt force. When law that has become nothing but a tissue of arbitrary technicalities, is it surprising that someone would eventually treat the concept of law itself as one huge annoying technicality? Meanwhile it is hard to imagine popular passions being inflamed by the call to vindicate the claims of Congress, which has systematically rendered itself incapable of passing routine legislation with majority support, or of the Courts, which have increasingly revealed themselves to be the servants of presidential power in any case. Nor is it any wonder that low-information normies approve of Trump’s actions, because the dysfunction of the system has created pent-up demand for someone to finally do something — without all the infighting and excuses.
The fact that what is being done is purely destructive, that we are losing things we may never get back, has not yet become clear. And when it does, we will need leaders who can speak to the level of justice and legitimacy rather than law and norm and procedure — leaders who can say, straightforwardly, that Trump shouldn’t do what he’s doing because it’s pointlessly cruel and that Trump doesn’t have a mandate to do what he’s doing because he’s a liar. When that moment comes, though, I fear that we will instead get the same mealy-mouthed losers who could do nothing but mumble about a “democracy” that means you can only vote for one party for the rest of your life and you should never actually expect to get anything out of it. We should want a return to law, a return to procedures and norms recognized by all political actors — but only on just and legitimate terms. Perhaps that can occur within the boundaries of the existing constitution, but a return to the status quo ante of 2024 is not and cannot be the answer. Until people of good will come to understand this, there will never be hope.
The protagonist of Kevin Smith’s Dogma, the last living descendant of Mary, mother of Jesus, is named Bethany. It’s standard practice in this kind of apocalyptic film for names to mean something, and Dogma seems in general to bear this out. Chris Rock’s character, the black thirteenth apostle, is called Rufus, after the biblical son of Simon the Cyrene, mentioned in Mark’s account of the crucifixion and by Paul in Romans 13. Alan Rickman plays the voice of God, Metatron, and takes his name from an angel who appears as a divine figure standing beside God in various apocryphal texts. So why is the last living descendant of God called Bethany?
The name Bethany comes from the biblical town of Bethany, where Lazarus lived with his sisters, Mary and Martha. Like Lazarus, Bethany dies and is resurrected by God – here Alanis Morissette rather than Jesus. I’d like to suggest that we can infer from this that Jay and Silent Bob occupy, in Smith’s film, the roles of Mary and Martha.
Like Mary and Martha with Lazarus Jay and Silent Bob have – despite their best efforts – a non-sexual relationship with Bethany. Like Mary, who washed Jesus’ feet in an erotic act of service and is traditionally associated with sex workers, Jay is constantly making sexual advances to the people around him. Like Mary, who angrily remonstrates with Jesus when Lazarus dies (‘Lord if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”), Jay shouts at God who has appeared apparently too late to prevent catastrophe: “What the fuck is this shit?! Who the fuck are you lady?!” Like Martha, who approaches Jesus with faith (“But I know that even now God will give you whatever you ask”) and opens up the tomb where Lazarus’ body has been laid to rest, it is Silent Bob who carries Bethany’s lifeless body to God to be raised. Like Martha, it is Silent Bob who quietly gets on with the necessary work, and Jay who insists on conversation.
Let us say then, with Jesus: “Jay has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from him.” Great is the mystery of Dogma. Blessed be the name of Alanis Morissette.
As I have been writing my posts on the relationship between Trump and neoliberalism, a feeling of futility has sometimes set in. Who cares about this abstract question amid all the wreckage he has already created? My first response to such a demand for practicality is to insist that it is always better to understand than not to understand. To the extent that my analysis is accurate, it’s important because it’s true. And that truth may lead to a strategic gain, insofar as viewing Trump as a big dumb continuation of neoliberalism might reduce the leftist temptation to think “maybe we can use this” or, worse, “maybe he has a point.”
On a personal level, though, part of the reason I am focusing on such large-scale questions is simply that I have done a poor job as a day-to-day commentator or prognosticator. I wrote shortly after the election that it seemed fanciful that Trump would attempt to cancel future elections. Now it turns out that his opening gambits were to attempt to invalidate the Fourteenth Amendment and the separation of powers, which makes extreme outcomes like that much more imaginable. At the same time, however, the Democratic refrain that democracy is in peril seems to remain unconvincing to the general population. Trump’s approval ratings are favorable, seemingly precisely because of the actions he is taking. He won the election, he seems to be taking bold action to fulfill his promises, and most people like it — where’s the threat to democracy?
The problem, as ever, is the lack of clarity about what democracy is and why it’s valuable. And part of the confusion comes from the tendency to conflate “democracy” with “the US Constitutional system,” which was avowedly set up in order to tame and even frustrate democratic ambitions to the extent possible. To the extent that Democrats are simply calling for a return to the conventional constitutional order, I would certainly prefer that to the current situation. But that order is sclerotic and unsustainable. Indeed, many of the kinds of actions that Trump is doing now are ones that I would have liked to see Obama or Biden do — strong-arming the Senate instead of deferring to their stupid anti-democratic customs, or simply ignoring things like the debt ceiling. I’m even on record as saying that Obama should have refused to acknowledge Trump’s Electoral College technicality and begun the transition with Hillary.
What’s frustrating about this situation is that this final presidential push was bound to happen. The current system does not fulfill popular demands, by design, and there’s no reason to expect a society to tolerate that indefinitely. And unfortunately, the presidency is the only institution other than Congress with anything like a democratic mandate, and it is definitely the only institution that can directly do stuff. The shame is that it didn’t happen under a president who wanted to do good, instead of a president who wants to do nothing but harm. And that stems in part from our old friend neoliberalism, whose “best practices” do not include bold state initiatives. But it also stems from the older generation of Democrats’ pathetic Boomer reverence for the Constitution that never evolved past childish Cold War truisms. And now that it’s tumbling down, we’re all being asked to hope that the system that frustrated popular demands for a generation and gave us Trump will somehow stop Trump.
There is nonetheless a deep irony here, because Trump’s rampage against the constitutional order is obviously undercutting the sources of presidential power and even of state legitimacy. One reason that the executive branch is able to do stuff is that it knows stuff — indeed, it provides the standard statistics that underwrite all other public and private economic activity and much else besides. By destroying that basic state capacity, Trump is destroying any reason for citizens to trust the government about anything, unless they happen to trust the current holder of the presidency. It becomes pretty difficult to run a society — even a paranoid police state determined to carry out the biggest forced population transfer in human history — without that baseline of trust. It also becomes pretty difficult to know whether you’ve succeeded in achieving your goals and to convince others that you have.
Low-information voters are still only seeing the broadest themes in Trump’s actions. He said he’d cut foreign aid, which most voters falsely believe to take up a huge portion of the budget, and he’s doing so. He said he’d appoint Musk to head up an effort to aggressively cut waste in the federal government, and he’s doing so. He said he’d use tariffs to strong-arm other countries, and he’s doing so. The self-undermining and nonsensical nature of many of those actions, much less their long-term consequences for the constitutional order, are seemingly not on people’s radar. But if he continues to “succeed,” many people will be rudely awakened to the fact that the government seemingly has no ability to benefit them in any way — and whether that realization hits while Trump is president or after he dies peacefully in his sleep surrounded by his friends and family, it will be a major, probably fatal blow to the legitimacy of the system.
It might even be the kind of things where particular states or regions start asking why the federal government even exists, and then the great “national divorce” so desired by conservatives might actually happen. And then we might all recall, too late, that “national divorce” is a euphemism for civil war — which, as everybody knows, is the very worst thing that can happen to a society. So now I’ve maxed out the negativity of my predictions about Trump and no longer have to worry about being made to look naive by the actual course of events.
In my last post, I awkwardly name-dropped a book to admit I hadn’t read it — namely Robert McDonald’s Works Like a Charm: Incentive Rhetoric and the Economization of Everyday Life, available wherever fine books are sold. Since then I have in fact read it and want to discuss some connections with my notion of a Trumpian “shove” as the successor to the neoliberal “nudge.” What follows is not a full account of the book — which, along with being a great critique of “nudge” rhetoric, also turns out to be an accessible primer on Lacan (with depressingly relevant examples) — but a sampling of some key concepts that I find especially applicable to Trump’s heretical neoliberalism.
McDonald’s Lacanian approach allows him to see some internal dynamics of the nudge that otherwise would not be as evident. (I will spare you the Lacan and give you the pay-off.) First, he notes that nudges never live up to their promise of seamless unconscious manipulation of behavior. Instead, they always announce themselves more or less clearly, spurring the subject to begin questioning what the nudger wants from them — and possibly rebelling against the intended outcome simply out of annoyance at the attempted manipulation. For this reason, nudges generally don’t work, and presumably the nudgers know they don’t work. Hence McDonald concludes that nudges are not actually directed at the ostensible nudgees, but are messages sent to some presumed third party. For example, the attempts to “incentivize” a return to work post-covid by removing unemployment benefits had not apparent impact on employment — but they were a powerful message that everyone should get back to work and no longer expect any mollycoddling (my term, not McDonald’s). Finally, the nudge paradigm as a whole sends a broader message of despair, signalling clearly that any deliberate collective project is impossible. This opens up a performative contradiction, because on the one hand, only the market can be trusted to deliver any social benefit, but on the other hand, the market is apparently not achieving that on its own and needs tinkering by expert state actors.
Applying these to Trump’s “shoves” — his attempts to use economic inducements to blackmail people into his desired behavior — I think we get further evidence that Trump is a heretical mutation of the neoliberal project. First of all, like a classic nudge, Trump’s “shoves” generate a lot of questions as to what he really wants, but in contrast to the neoliberal apparatchik, Trump’s desire is fundamentally unknowable — apparently even to himself. Hence investors and political commentators all assumed, up to the weekend before they were set to take effect, that Trump would call off his harsh tariffs against Canada and Mexico. And at the last minute he did, at least temporarily, after securing concessions that most observers agree were already happening (and, bizarrely, conceding to Claudia Sheinbaum’s demand that he take more action to stop the flow of guns into Mexico). Will he find another excuse to kick the can down the road in early March? Presumably, but who knows?
What is at stake here is more than simple incoherence or inconsistency — and we are certainly not dealing with some game of 11-dimensional chess where Trump is skillfully deploying Nixon’s “madman strategy.” Where the nudger ostensibly sought to influence the behavior of the nudgee for the sake of some particular end, Trump’s shoves seem to be nothing but the assertion of dominance and control for its own sake. And we can see that the same ambition was present in the original nudge paradigm, which promised a form of seamless social control without political conflict. Surely what made nudging so appealing to people like Barack Obama was not the series of piecemeal social gains they could deliver (increasing uptake of 401(k)’s by 6%!) but the very idea that “smart” policymakers could gently guide society from behind the scenes without indulging in anything so vulgar as political contestation.
In practice, many subjects were offended by the implied blackmail of the nudge — and in protest, they have helped to elect someone who took away the implication but kept the blackmail. But, importantly, they are no longer the people being nudged. Rather, the deep state wreckers and DEI elites and, above all, foreigners are finally getting a taste of their own medicine. This is why Trump and company have targetted arguably the most sympathetic and beneficial use of government money (USAID) for absolute elimination and why they began their tariff crusade by threatening to blow up relations with our closest neighbors — to send the message that they will be swayed by no moral claim, especially not a claim of loyalty. All that matters is the brute fact of economic competition, which Trump is attempting to rig so that America wins every time (instead of merely most of the time). Any other concern or priority is not merely a distraction from the important task of “winning” every economic statistic, but an active deception and a ploy.
And that brings us to the performative contradiction of Trump’s agenda. If the classic nudgers were testifying to the failure of the state to organize collective life, Trumpian shoves presuppose the failure of the economy itself — and on a global scale. In his very desperation to gain the approval embedded in the economic statistics he has chosen to target (coming out “ahead” in all trade balances), Trump implicitly invalidates all previous economic outcomes as illegitimate, tainted as they are by wokeness and meddling foreigners. And his attempt to assert American domination presupposes that America has been almost comically weak for basically the entire postwar era, allowing even Canadians to manipulate them into unfavorable trade deals.
This disconnection from reality is what makes Trump so scary, but it is also what makes him weak. Indeed, on his own terms, Trump cannot possibly succeed, because he has deprived himself of any standard of judgment other than his own irritable whim — which will never be satisfied and which, ironically, makes him extremely vulnerable to people who manipulate him by setting up incentives and fooling him into thinking their preferred outcome is his own choice.
Though I haven’t written much on neoliberalism lately, I still dip into the literature now and again. The next book in my queue, Robert McDonald’s Works Like a Charm: Incentive Rhetoric and the Economization of Everyday Life, has put me in mind of the classic neoliberal notion of the “nudge” and how it might help us think through the vexed question of Trump’s relation to neoliberalism. (This post does not directly reflect McDonald’s specific view, though, because I am not planning to start it until my train ride tomorrow — but in the true spirit of blogging, I decided to write at the moment I had the time, the idea, and the motivation rather than waiting.)
In the “Trump chapter” of Neoliberalism’s Demons, I claim that Trump is a heretical neoliberal in the proper theological sense — someone who radicalizes the premises of neoliberalism in order to purify it. Trump doubtless violates many specific neoliberal policy preferences (e.g., free trade, trust in abstract expertise and competence), but when it comes to what I identify as the moral core of neoliberalism, he is a true believer. He really sees the world as a field of zero-sum competitions whose results don’t just sort people into winners and losers, but do so in a way that reveals their true worthiness as people. His critique of actual-existing neoliberalism is that the “wrong” people and countries are winning.
Hence Trump concludes that the system must be rigged against the “right” people and countries and sets about righting that supposed wrong to make sure that the “right” people and countries start winning again. Obviously his framework for determining the “right” people and countries is deeply racist and xenophobic, but I think it’s important to highlight that he’s taking a specifically neoliberal approach to racism and xenophobia — the damage that the racial and foreign Others are doing is economic and calls for a shift in economic policy. The economy is still in principle the site for legitimation of individuals and groups, but in his view it hasn’t been allowed to operate properly. Once he “fixes” it, white people will once again be in charge of everything (instead of merely most things) and America will once again dominate the world (instead of being merely the unipolar hegemon).
Trump is pursuing this agenda even more radically in his second term. What’s striking to me, however, is how thoroughly neoliberal his tools are. So far, everything is structured as a big, dumb “nudge.” To start with the least heretical policy: he doesn’t like the trade balance with other countries, and so he threatens them economically with tariffs. Traditional neoliberals would prefer that tariffs be kept at a minimum, but there is room for protective or punitive tariffs if they aren’t following the rules of the free market, as Trump believes other countries are not. More radical, though, is his attempt to weaponize economic tools to achieve seemingly unrelated policy goals, like using tariffs in his negotiations with Colombia over deportations (apparently unsuccessfully, or at least not as successfully as Trump believes) or his threats to impose punitive tariffs on Denmark if they do not cede Greenland to him. And on the domestic side, he doesn’t like anything “woke” or DEI, so he tries to take away all their money — most dramatically through the attempted freeze on federal grants and loans, but also with the more routine threats to withold federal funding from sanctuary cities, school districts that acknowledge trans people exist, and other supposed malefactors.
In both cases, Trump also holds in reserve the punitive arm of the state — refusing to rule out a military conquest of Greenland (surely a mighty feat that will live on in song and legend) or the deployment of troops in his deportation scheme. That, too, broadly fits with the neoliberal paradigm, which tends to delegitimate any direct role for the state other than the police and military. But it is fascinating that these hamfisted economic “nudges” are what he reaches for first and most often. From the classic neoliberal perspective, the actions are much too “in your face” and forceful, rather than the seamless, almost unconscious manipulation that “nudges” were supposed to achieve. Hence we could call them “shoves” rather than “nudges.” But both are still economic in nature, and thus in continuity with a worldview in which economic incentives are the only legible motivations.
More than that, Trump conceives of the policy priorities that are not directly economic from a common sense perspective as profoundly economic. They are part of his agenda to “fix” the economic order so it starts delivering the “correct” results again. And once we see that, even some of his crazier policy preferences start to make a perverse kind of sense. The best example here is his fantasy that tariffs can somehow replace the income tax as the primary funding source for the federal government. This goal is for all intents and purposes impossible to achieve and the pursuit of it would cause untold suffering and disruption. But what makes him think it must be possible is that it is morally necessary — it would be a form of reparations from the whole world, for all the economic damage they have done to America with the many unfair deals they have imposed upon us. The same logic worked on a smaller scale with the fantasy that Mexico would pay for the wall. By supposedly “sending” so many immigrants to steal American jobs, Mexico had done profound economic harm to America, so it’s only fair that they should foot the bill for the solution.
Trump’s mutation of neoliberalism is of course delusional and simplistic — but it is, in its own way, deeply coherent. In fact, it is too coherent, which leaves it with no room to process the unexpected or even the unknown. The fact that all the people who actually know anything objectively true at all are in on the anti-American DEI conspiracy is obviously a huge weakness, and it leaves those of us on the outside of the Trump bubble with very little leverage to persuade them to change course. Yet I cannot help but notice that the reciprocal shove of everyone in the country simultaneously shouting at them that, no, they can’t arbitrarily shut down the entire federal government because some of duly legislated programs might be too “woke” did prove effective. We can also expect reality itself to shove them back if they really do attempt to replace the income tax with tariffs, because they will very quickly realize that they don’t have any money to pay all the guys with the guns.
This is obviously very far from the ideal of deliberative democracy, but it makes sense that a neoliberal heretic would not be invested in an ideal to which the orthodox believers gave half-hearted lip service at best.
This year I had the unique opportunity to visit both Athens and Rome (on separate trips). I’ve therefore seen a ton of ruins. In most of my travels, I’ve found ruins and archaeology in general less interesting than well-preserved artworks in comfortable museums. This time it was more of a mixed bag — the Acropolis, for instance, was a little underwhelming, but it felt very meaningful to me to wander about in the Agora, imagining that this was the same ground Socrates trod.
My reaction to Roman ruins was more complex. Part of the reason that I had never visited Rome before, despite having ample opportunity, was that I have an antipathy to the Roman Empire, due to my intellectual formation in liberation-oriented theology circles. To me, they are history’s Bad Guys, and there is something pathological about the way they are fetishized again and again throughout Western history. What jumped out at me on this tour — especially in the day we spent at Pompeii, the preservation of which surely counts as one of the most horrifying yet amazing things ever to happen — was just how capable they were. The design of the city of Pompeii, for instance, seemed more functional and intelligent than that of 95% of US cities. (Here I count even the biggest cities — surely the Romans would have anticipated the problem of garbage piling up on the streets in New York City and designed the city with alleyways!) The fact that the routes of Roman roads are still travelled today, that aqueducts are still functional, that the international metropolis of Rome literally still uses the sewer dug by the Romans — it’s absolutely incredible.
One of My Esteemed Partner’s favorite sites was the Pantheon. On the ground level, it’s just a moderately cluttered and tacky church, but the ceiling is an unparalleled feat of engineering — a huge dome, with no internal infrastructure or supports. Contemporary investigators literally don’t know how they achieved it. And on this trip, a retrospectively obvious thing dawned on me: for most Western Europeans for a thousand years or more, that was how it was with essentially all Roman achievements.
Often modern people look down their nose at the so-called “dark ages” as an era when people were obsessed with the past, seemingly arbitrarily. But they were physically surrounded by infrastructure and buildings erected by the ancients that they couldn’t build if they wanted to. The engineering know-how, the access to resources, the sheer ability to organize and structure a labor process — it was all gone and there was seemingly no way to recapture it.
The situation reminded me of a common trope of contemporary dystopian sci-fi. In many of these stories, there is a kind of deposit of older technology that current-day people either rely on without fully understanding or else scavenge for parts — often with unanticipated consequences. The same thing happened with Roman technologies. The Colosseum, for instance, was obviously subject to wear and tear from the weather, as well as earthquakes, but a big part of why more and more sections of it kept collapsing was that people were simply pulling out the iron rods that held the columns together and using them for something else.
We could say the same for the intellectual achievements of the ancients. Medieval people didn’t rely on them simply because they were lazy or unimaginative. They lacked the intellectual infrastructure — not just the traditions of education, but often the physical documents themselves, which had to be copied afresh every generation or so. They assumed that Galen was smarter than any contemporary doctor not only because he was such a genius but because he was in a position to know much more than any current-day investigator. You can’t just rebuild that intellectual infrastructure through sheer force of will, certainly not as an individual. The most gifted person in medieval Europe simply could not get as far as a person in the Hellenistic era would have been able to get. Medieval Europeans thought the ancients were better because they were, and it took centuries for them to get to a place where they could seriously think of themselves as surpassing their achievements.
My big worry is that we are currently experiencing a process of decay that will leave future generations living among ruins. It might seem absurd in terms of contemporary ideology to say that we will soon be living off of older technologies, but even within a single lifetime we’ve collectively lost abilities — the ability to get to the moon safely, for instance — and there are still crucial systems that are running on “outdated” code (such as COBOL for bank mainframes, etc.). More prosaically, our roads, our other infrastructure, our housing stock are all cheaper and crappier than they were a generation ago. It is impossible to imagine contemporary buildings remaining functional a century from now, as so many institutional buildings from the turn of the 20th century are. In fact, many of them aren’t functional even when they’re built!
But my more urgent concern is the intellectual infrastructure. Academics of my generation look at people like Fredric Jameson and think of that kind of erudition as simply unachievable — much less earlier polymathic figures like Auerbach. I don’t think anyone the age of 50 would claim to know as much as Jameson did when he was 50. People just don’t do that anymore. And we are witnessing a further ratcheting down, at least in the US, as the humble art of reading an entire book is increasingly lost to the younger generation. Students are graduating from high school and college knowing less and less, and able to do less and less. What happens when they’re the ones teaching the younger generation?
This is not just “kids these days” scaremongering. It’s not about them as individuals, it’s about intellectual infrastructure. My strongest students now are every bit as smart and capable as my strongest students were when I first started teaching — in fact, I’d count some of the students I’ve taught in the last couple years as the finest I’ve ever encountered. But it’s much more binary, and more seriously, the students who lack those abilities and experiences most often don’t think of it as a problem. The students who can engage at a higher level appear to be anomalies, as though they are “born with it.” And if emulating their own stronger peers does not seem like a live possibility, what about emulating the professor, much less the people who are writing or editing or translating the books they’re reading?
Once in a discussion of Aristotle’s scientific writings, a student generously suggested that Aristotle did the best he could, because he couldn’t just look things up on Wikipedia like we can. I jumped in to say: Aristotle was Wikipedia to them! Just like you look it up on Wikipedia, they looked it up in Aristotle! My improvised retort was perhaps a little glib, but especially with the rise of generative AI, it does seem like we’re going to be in a situation where more and more people are going to be forced to rely on a deposit of knowledge from prior to 2019 — one that can be remixed and perhaps commented on, but not really expanded, because the skills and resources that it takes to expand it have somehow withered away.
Some have suggested that this shift is okay, because students are gaining other kinds of competencies we lack. To me, that seems like magical thinking — much like an ancient person assuming that if the Romans left, someone else would come along to build and maintain the roads. Things don’t happen simply because the space is left open for them. Maybe on the margins the new educational regime where text is radically decentered allows other competencies to grow more than they otherwise would, though some of the claimed competencies strike me as having dubious value (like posting TikTok videos). But there is no medium as information-dense or as able to capture complexity as text. People who cannot work with text simply cannot learn as much overall, and no amount of silver linings can undo the brute fact that less is less.
Mass literacy is a kind of infrastructure, and like all forms of infrastructure in our neoliberal and now potentially post-neoliberal world, it has been allowed to crumble. Without a rapid course correction that appears to be nowhere on the horizon, we are headed down a path where many future generations are going to be gleaning from our scraps, because they have been deprived of the resources and knowledge they need to match our achievements. Who knows how long people will look back on the golden age of the Twentieth Century like medieval Europeans looked back on Roman times? As history shows us, it can be a long time.
At the AAR this past weekend, Beatrice Marovich hosted a discussion about the decline of theology. Eventually, this evolved into a discussion of the decline of theology blogging, which was where many of us had cut our teeth intellectually — and, of course, where many of us met in the first place. I have been processing this conversation over the past few days and wanted to write down some thoughts for posterity, as someone who was (if I may boast of such an august position) pretty central to the enterprise of theology blogging at its height.
The first question to ask is why theology blogging took off in the mid to late 2000s. I believe that part of the reason is simply that theology as a field has many intrinsic properties that dispose it to a relatively open-ended, undisciplined discussion like the blogosphere. Above all, theology is inherently interdisciplinary, combining conceptual analysis, literary interpretation, historical and political reflection, cultural criticism — basically everything that any humanities discipline does is done in theology. People in theology were therefore ready to be part of the widest possible range of conversations in the humanities blogosphere, and people in my immediate intellectual circle were in fact closely engaged with bloggers in literary studies, philosophy, political theory, and many other fields.
There are other factors more particular to that historical moment. To put it bluntly, it was the Bush years. This meant that religion was an unavoidable topic. That was the heyday of political theology (in the “real,” Schmittian sense, not the broader sense of “politically engaged theology”) and of the Paul and philosophy trend — meaning that other intellectuals were ready to take theologians seriously as interlocutors in a way they might not have been in the 90s. By the same token, the fact that the evangelicals seemed to be so clearly in the ascendant in the 2000s produced many opportunities for alienation and disillusionment among intellectually curious and passionate young adults, in a way that would have been less potent when evangelicals could present themselves as a threatened subculture in the 90s.
From both directions, then, it was a perfect storm. And for a few years, things were very intellectually intense and exciting. But the vibe started to shift already as I was finishing up grad school. Part of it was a degree of attrition — people got jobs and got busy, or didn’t get jobs and dropped out. The impact of the Financial Crisis was especially damaging in the latter respect, and in cutting off the pipeline of younger participants. And of course there was social media, which cannibalized the entire internet. A big part of blogging culture were the comment threads, which fell virtually silent as people decided they preferred to comment on social media rather than on the post itself. For a time, I would exhort such people to comment on the blog if they wanted to join the conversation, and they inevitably dismissed the idea — or (since they tended to be left-leaning social media users) claimed that I was somehow violating the principles of social justice by suggesting that someone should comment in a space where they felt potentially “unsafe.” My reaction to such remarks, then and now, was: “Bullshit.” And in retrospect we can see how damaging it has been to shift all public discourse onto algorithmically-driven, profit-seeking platforms — which now even actively discourage the use of links that would take one outside the corporately-curated experience.
There were also factors specific to academic and particularly theology blogging. I am thinking here of the tendency toward institutionalization. Specialist journals, centers, and even departments started putting up blogs, which competed for everyone’s free writing time even as they squelched the free-wheeling fun of the blogosphere. Even among bloggers themselves, there were attempts to create quasi-institutions in the form of group blogs (like Long Sunday or The Valve in circles adjacent to me). Obviously this is somewhat hypocritical of me to criticize, since The Weblog and An und für sich were always group blogs. But they were also very clearly my personal blog, not an impersonal institution. Since I knew that few had the same writing stamina, my strategy was to provide the audience for whenever a friend or intellectual comrade wanted to put something out there. (In retrospect, I worry that my dominance might have dissuaded some potential contributors, but that’s a different problem than impersonal institutionality.)
In the theology blogging space, there were two attempted institutionalizations that I believe were particularly damaging. The first was Syndicate Theology, which stole the idea of doing book events on major new publications in theology (a stock in trade of The Weblog and An und für sich at their height) and sucked the life out of it by overproducing them. I know that saying “stole” may come across as loaded language, but I heard reliable reports that the creators of Syndicate had our practice specifically in mind when they developed the site. They did not consult with me in any way, nor did they solicit me to participate or offer to do an event on any of my books — all of which points to a guilty conscience in my opinion. I’m happy to burn that bridge publicly now, because of course virtually no one reads the site. Just like Borders, they put their independent competitors out of business before overextending themselves.
The other problematic institutionalization was the blog attached to the journal Political Theology. Reportedly they were forced to do the blog by the corporate owner of the journal, but even within that context they proceeded in an unethical way. In the early stages, they repeatedly attempted to “poach” writers from my blog — though, again, never me. Later on, they started apparently publishing anything anyone sent them, leading to some pretty embarrassing posts. Ultimately they put out something so egregious — accusing leftists of supporting jihad — that some friends and I, concerned with how the low quality of the blog and the offensiveness of that post might reflect on the field, requested that it be taken down. The editors were so stubbornly defensive that we were forced to publish an open letter on the issue. Along the way, they had offered that we could write a rebuttal piece for the blog or even take over some of the editorial duties — both insulting offers in context. I joked at the time that I would take over as their blog editor only if I would be allowed to shut it down altogether.
Obviously I still have some bitterness on the last two points, but as I said, this was a huge part of my life — and honestly, a lot of the institutionalization attempts seemed to involve stealing my ideas or poaching young academics I had supported, while cutting me out personally. Whatever may be the case with my own personal grudges, though, what is certain is that the atmosphere became much more cynical and careerist, which again militated against the fun, free-wheeling atmosphere of blogging. Blog posts became a chore, a CV line, a way of doing a favor that one might be able to cash in later — not a forum for community-building or intellectual exploration. If Twitter and Facebook were what killed off the blogosphere, maybe what made people less resistant to the change was that blogging had already become too much like LinkedIn.
In the best spirit of the classical age of blogging, I have been open and vulnerable to you, probably to an inappropriate and self-undermining degree. Please reciprocate in the same spirit by submitting any comments, questions, reminiscences, apologies, points of rebuttal, or cease-and-desist letters in the comment form below rather than grousing on social media about it.
[The following is a conference presentation delivered at the American Academy of Religion’s annual conference in San Diego, under the auspices of the Political Theology programming unit.]
The topic of this presentation began as a joke—an exceptionally niche joke, but a joke nonetheless. For many election cycles now, I have been declaring my intention to vote for the katechōn rather than the man of lawlessness. The reference, which I hope is clear to most attendees at a political theology session, is to the New Testament book of 2 Thessalonians. There, Paul—or, more likely, a later pseudonymous author trying to tone down or “correct” Paul’s apocalyptic teaching in 1 Thessalonians—writes that, contrary to the views that some people attribute to him, the apocalypse is not near at hand but has been indefinitely delayed. The passage reads as follows:
Let no one deceive you in any way; for that day [of Judgment] will not come unless the rebellion comes first and the lawless one is revealed, the one destined for destruction. He opposes and exalts himself above every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, declaring himself to be God. Do you not remember that I told you these things when I was still with you? And you know what is now restraining him, so that he may be revealed when his time comes. For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work, but only until the one who now restrains it is removed. And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will destroy with the breath of his mouth, annihilating him by the manifestation of his coming. (2 Thessalonians 2:3-8)
In contrast to 1 Thessalonians, which encouraged Paul’s readers to look forward to the apocalyptic fulfillment of the resurrection of the dead, the pseudonymous author focuses almost exclusively on the destruction that will be wrought by the “man of lawlessness” once the force or individual restraining him—namely, the katechōn—is removed. God is still going to win out in the end, but perhaps the restrainer is a better bet for the time being.
The figure of the restrainer has been the object of considerable reflection in the field of political theology. In Nomos of the Earth, Carl Schmitt argued that the katechōn was the central concept of Christian politics, allowing it to bracket its apocalyptic expectations and get to work creating political institutions in this present world, and many—including me, in The Prince of This World—have argued that the concept of the modern state is a secularized version of this figure who restrains the forces of apocalyptic destruction. Those forces of destruction are normally envisioned as coming from outside the institutional order, whether in the form of foreign enemies or domestic insurrectionaries. My joke about voting for the katechōn, presumably as a form of negative polarization against the man of lawlessness, expressed the sense that contemporary political rhetoric tends to figure the danger as coming from inside the house—that is to say, one of the two traditional parties of government is claimed to represent a mortal threat to the institutional order as such.
And now, of course, the joke is on me, because I have foolishly agreed to write a conference presentation analyzing what turned out to be a devastating election result. I do not intend to use this as a forum for punditry or prediction, genres that most of us have presumably consumed in excess in the last few weeks. Instead, I intend to carry out a political theological investigation of the apocalyptic rhetoric that has marked American political discourse in recent decades—and, it should be noted, almost equally on both sides. Just as Kamala Harris presented Donald Trump as a mortal danger to the American republic, so too did he paint her potential victory as the death of the nation. By pointing this out, I don’t mean to claim that both sides are equally justified in their use of this rhetoric, nor to discount the profound fears that Trump’s return to power have aroused—fears that I very much share. Even if this election turns out to be the time the rhetoric comes true, however, it is still worth reflecting on what it means that a nation split almost perfectly 50-50 between two institutional parties that are both more than 150 years old has developed such an apocalyptic political culture.
I will carry out my analysis in two steps. First, after briefly laying out what I understand to be the task of political theology, I will try to gain some critical distance from our desperate political situation by drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s reading of 2 Thessalonians in his short book The Mystery of Evil, where he claims that the passage is not an apocalyptic vision but instead reveals the deep structure of Western political institutions. With these concepts on the table, I will then plunge back into our domestic political hellscape, using the American situation to show the limits of Agamben’s reading of 2 Thessalonians.
I.
I should begin my analysis proper by clarifying what I mean by political theology. I do not use the term to designate a politically-engaged normative theology—for instance, one that would provide us with values and hopes that would help us to cope with our present political situation. Such work is necessary for faith communities, but I am not a member of any faith community and don’t presume to dictate their political action to them. Instead, I am a critic and scholar, and I view the task of political theology as that of exposing the theological roots of political concepts. As I define it in Neoliberalism’s Demons, “Political theology is a holistic, genealogical inquiry into the structures and sources of legitimacy in a particular historical moment. Political theology in this sense is political because it investigates institutions and practices of governance (whether they are defined as state-based or economic, public or private), and it is theological because it deals with questions of meaning and value (regardless of the form the answers take)” (128). Hence I believe that political theology is especially well suited to analyze the apocalyptic turn in American political rhetoric not solely or even primarily because that rhetoric is drawing on religious patterns of thought, but because it points toward a profound crisis of legitimacy. By the same token, Agamben’s Mystery of Evil is an especially fruitful point of reference for this analysis not only because it discusses 2 Thessalonians, but because it is fundamentally a book about crises of legitimacy—which Agamben believes to afflict all Western institutions.
The text itself consists of two short essays that heavily overlap. The first is a reflection on Benedict XVI’s abdication from the papal throne due to old age, which strikes me as uncannily timely given that the defining moment of this election cycle was Biden’s withdrawal from the race for the same stated reason. Agamben views Benedict’s decision as exemplary because it “forcefully calls attention to the distinction between two essential principles of our ethico-political tradition, of which our societies seem to have lost all awareness: legitimacy and legality” (2). By admitting that he was unable to carry out the duties of his office any longer and stepping aside in favor of a more vigorous leader, Benedict was, in Agamben’s reading, asserting the purely spiritual power of his office rather than asserting his legal prerogative to hold the position until death. More than restoring the legitimacy of the church in the public eye, however, for Agamben Benedict’s resignation serves to expose how much the church has given up all claim of legitimacy by descending into the machinations of money and politics.
To that extent, then, Benedict’s gesture was a messianic one in Agamben’s terms. This is one of the slipperiest concepts in his arsenal, not least because it seems to evoke hopes of political revolution or apocalyptic fulfillment. For Agamben, though, the messianic is ultimately a philosophical category rather than a political or theological one. The messianic is not concerned with any particular historical revelation and especially not with any arbitrary sequence of future events that is supposed to lead to the end of history. Instead, the messianic exposes the dynamics of history by providing a point of view from which the operation of the “political machine” that structures our lives is suspended so that we can actually understand it—and perhaps thereby transform it. Agamben’s reading of theological texts, especially the texts of Paul, is therefore a kind of secularization of their insights. In The Time That Remains, for instance, Agamben claims that the famous “already/not-yet” dynamic of messianic expectation is not tied to the postponed arrival of a particular messianic figure known as Jesus of Nazareth, but instead provides us tools to understand the experience of time through language. Hence it turns out that there is something fundamentally messianic about rhyming in poetry, for instance.
Agamben clears the space for this kind of reading by asserting—idiosyncratically and, in my view, falsely—that Paul is emphatically not an apocalyptic thinker and that apparently apocalyptic passages should instead be read “messianically.” In the case of 2 Thessalonians, such an assertion is especially counterintuitive, since the passage has almost universally been regarded as an apocalyptic narrative in which the katechōn is taken to represent a concrete historical individual or institution—most often the Roman Empire. Nevertheless, Agamben finds a productive minority tradition in the fourth century theologian Tyconius, who is often classified as a Donatist heretic but who had a decisive influence on Augustine (and the young Joseph Ratzinger). For Tyconius, the katechōn is not an external agency like the Roman Empire, but the Church itself, insofar as it is still mired in sin. Whereas the conventional reading positions the katechōn as good, or at least as a necessary evil, Tyconius opens up the space to see this restraining power as a negative thing—and, in one of Agamben’s characteristic interpretive tours de force, to understand what pseudo-Paul calls the anomos in a more positive valence, not as a wicked individual or force, but as something that is “outside the law” in the same sense that Paul can describe the messiah and his followers as being “outside the law.”
Translating his extrapolation from Tyconius into more political terms, Agamben claims that “the katechōn is the power—the Empire, but also the Church, like every juridically constituted authority—that opposes and conceals the lawlessness that defines messianic time and in this way slows the revelation of the ‘mystery of lawlessness.’ The unveiling of this mystery coincides with the manifestation fo the inoperativity of the law and with it the essential illegitimacy of every power in messianic time” (33-34). Agamben applies this analysis directly to our present, “when the powers of state act openly as outside the law,” so that “the anomos does not represent anything but the unveiling of the lawlessness that today defines every constituted power, within which State and terrorism form a single system” (34).
Surely this last bit is evocative of all kinds of examples in all our minds, from police violence up to the president-elect’s solicitation of stochastic terrorism. Equally evocative is Agamben’s assertion that we cannot simply rely on the workings of the law to fix this problem of pervasive illegality. Here we might think of the attempt to solve police violence through improved training and procedures or the long-cherished (and now-thwarted) hope that the law will somehow save us from Trump. From Agamben’s perspective, however, we can see that this strategy was doomed to fail, because “the hypertrophy of law, which presumes to legislate over everything, on the contrary betrays, through an excess of formal legality, the loss of all substantial legitimacy” (3). Elsewhere he associates this excess of legality with “the paradigm of the self-regulating market [that] has taken the place of that of justice and [that] pretends to be able to govern an ever more ungovernable society according to exclusively technical criteria” (17). In either case, we are dealing with a legal or regulatory system that has dispensed with the need to establish its own legitimacy and has indeed attempted to collapse legitimacy into legality without remainder—in other words, to effect a final victory of the katechōn over the man of lawlessness.
The real solution, Agamben claims, is to find a way to hold in productive tension “the two coordinated but radically heterogeneous principles—legitimacy and legality, spiritual power and temporal power, auctoritas and potestas, justice and law—that constitute the most precious patrimony of European culture” (18). Rather than hoping for some ultimate end of history to arrive, we need to participate actively in the dynamic of history, recognizing that no constituted order can escape contestation over its legitimacy and that the attempt to shut down that contestation through purely legal means leads only to the worst forms of illegality and violence.
II.
Returning to the American political scene, we can see that both parties are engaging in their own form of apocalyptic speculation, in Agamben’s derogatory sense. Both are claiming, again and again, that they represent the katechōn over against the forces of lawlessness on the other side. Obviously the rhetoric is more plausible on the Democratic side, given Trump’s straightforward criminality and obvious ignorance of and contempt for the American constitutional system. But on the Republican side, Trump is taken to represent the avatar of a kind of natural order that is menaced by the Democrats’ supposed “woke” agenda. Both equally seem to imagine a final elimination of the lawless element. Democrats hope to defeat Trump once and for all, allowing a “strong Repulican Party” to rise from the ashes and begin the hard work of bipartisan dealmaking, while Trump supporters have more lurid fantasies of purging “woke” advocates from all positions of power and authority. Perhaps less obviously, I would also say that both sides share a kind of fetishization of the law. This is again clearest on the Democratic side, as they keep hoping that laws and norms will do their political work for them. But Republicans, too, seem to indulge in a kind of magical thinking where simply passing a law, or seizing a veto point, or locking in a permanent majority through gerrymandering, will simply be the end of the matter. That’s what I choose to hear in Trump’s declaration that his supporters will never need to vote again—not that he will somehow become dictator for life (or not only that), but that he will fix the system so completely and permanently that no one will ever be able to infect it with “wokeness” ever again.
If we return to the question of why the US should have such an apocalyptic political culture, Agamben’s analysis suggests that the reason is that American institutions are fundamentally illegitimate—hence menaced by the anomos. Neither side can fully admit that the anomos is coming from inside the house, however, so they project the lawless element onto their opponents, whom they then cast as foreign bodies to the republic that can and must be eliminated. And they have been in such a frustrating stalemate for so long because what they propose to do is impossible. The katechōn cannot finally win. Legality cannot finally swallow legitimacy whole. The attempt to make that happen is at best futile, as when Democrats allow their brief opportunities to govern to be fed through the woodchipper out of respect for “norms,” and at worst horrifically destructive, as with our worst fears about what Trump may actually be able to achieve this time around.
But what of Agamben’s prescription? What would it even look like to restore awareness of legitimacy as a principle heterogeneous to law? To me, the first step would be to break the taboo against even discussing major overhaul or even replacement of our absolutely abominable Constitution—but it’s difficult for me to imagine an actual overhaul or replacement happening without an intermediate stage marked by the old ultraviolence. And on a more conceptual level, I worry that Agamben is repeating, to a second degree, the same gesture he rightly critiques among the powers and principalities of our age. That is to say, I wonder if he is setting up the dynamic between legitimacy and legality, between the anomos and the katechōn, as a kind of meta-katechōn that staves off the decadence and violence that follows from the collapse of the tension between them. In other words, I wonder if he is offering us anything more than the naïve hope that we could make our existing order work if everyone would just act more in good faith, following the spirit of the law rather than weaponizing its letter. It is a telling sign of our predicament that such a seemingly obvious and even boring outcome seems roughly as likely as the coming of the messianic age.
Kamala Harris’s closing pitch to the American people was to highlight the threat to democracy represented by Donald Trump. I share that sense of threat — lying about a stolen election and fomenting an insurrection to disrupt its certification are certainly not the marks of someone with a deep and abiding respect for democratic norms. And yet I also understand why that pitch has fallen flat, even among people who acknowledge the 2020 election result and disapprove of the January 6 attacks. After explaining why I find the mainstream liberal rhetoric on this position so unconvincing, I will discuss the more profound sense in which Trump and his movement represent a threat to the possibility of a more meaningful democratic culture emerging in the US, then conclude with some practical tips you can try at home.
1. A Critique of the “Threat to Democracy” Rhetoric
On the one hand, America has always had a tenuous grasp on democratic norms. Disputes over voting procedure and eligibility have always been part of the normal range of political contestation; gerrymandering has been “a thing” since the founding of the Republic; state and local elections are routinely scheduled strategically to decrease turnout and thus accountability; money plays such a huge role in election races that people seem to regard donation as almost more important than voting itself; the Senate is insanely malapportioned and has adopted even more anti-democratic rules on top of that; the two-party system artificially narrows the range of political options in a self-reinforcing way; the separate election of two houses of Congress and the Presidency all but guarantees divided government and thus gridlock most of the time, preventing the implementation of any coherent political program; and of course the Electoral College has allowed the loser to win twice in our young century, to the point where the popular vote has basically disappeared from public discourse. There simply is not a robust culture of democracy in the US. No rational American adult expects their vote to lead directly to any specified outcome. We vote mainly to try to prevent the worst, but there is no sense in which the people at large have a hand in setting the political agenda.
Within that context, the Democrats have done virtually nothing to create the conditions for more authentic democracy. No voting rights legislation was passed or even seriously taken up under Biden — in part because Senate Democrats can’t (or simply don’t want to) discipline their own party even on the purely procedural question of the fillibuster rule. Al Gore conceded to his virtually unprecedented 2000 Electoral College upset almost immediately and Democrats since have done nothing to call into question the institution that has effectively stolen two elections from them, both with disastrous consequences. Indeed, they seem to be “leaning in,” running narrowly focused campaigns on swing states while making no effort in Republican-leaning states. Nor was there any attempt to counteract the extremely unpopular Dobbs decision — in part because they concede in advance that the Supreme Court would simply strike it down again.
And simply at the level of rhetoric, it cannot be the case that the only way to defend authentic democracy is to vote for one and only one party forever and ever amen. It cannot be the case that voters are not allowed to register their dissatisfaction with the omnishambles of the Biden administration because the only other option the system allows is illegitimate and unacceptable — a claim that the Democrats don’t seem to even believe themselves, since Kamala Harris called to “congratulate” Trump on his victory, just as Obama cheerfully agreed to meet with him before handing over the keys and Hillary attended his inauguration.
Certainly Trump is going to be more supportive of restricting voting rights than the typical Republican, and he is going to empower and embolden others on the state level to take more repressive actions. Republicans will likely further lock down their veto points and exploit all avaliable leverage to thwart the popular will — above all on the question of abortion. He may even concoct a rationale to run for a third term and find his hand-picked Supreme Court willing to legitimize it. But the notion that he is somehow going to abolish elections or appoint himself dictator for life strains credulity. And again, if Democrats really believe that, then they should be willing to take much more radical action to prevent him from taking power than re-running Hillary’s campaign with a slightly more charismatic and likeable candidate. Either the Democrats don’t really believe Trump is a burgeoning dictator or they are cowards and fools of almost unimaginable dimensions. (Or both!)
2. A Broader Concept of Democracy Than “People Periodically Vote”
There is more to democracy than just voting. First, the people who propose to rule themselves must have some sense of shared identity, embodied in shared practices and institutions. Second, the community must be able to hold itself and its representatives accountable with reference to some kind of reality principle — some shared empirical basis for judging the success or failure of policies and projects. In the narrow sense of “people voting,” Tuesday’s absolutely disastrous and devastating election result was undeniably democratic. Yet the other two conditions are obviously lacking.
In terms of the first condition, Trump and the Republicans have set themselves up as the sole arbiters of who really “counts” as American, and they have inculcated an attitude of paranoia and distrust in their supporters through false accusations of voter fraud. More broadly, they clearly have no investment in American political institutions except insofar as they can be weaponized to give them more power, nor do they value public goods such as public schools, public libraries, public health regulations, etc., etc. And this connects up with the second condition. For example, the result of the 2020 presidential election is an undeniable, brute empirical fact — yet a strong pluarlity of our fellow citizens believe the obviously self-serving lies of a life-long scam artist over the unanimous testimony of election officials and judges from all 50 states and both parties. And that is only the most extreme instance of an attitude that rejects factual claims from experts precisely because they are made by experts.
What unites both of these two anti-democratic tendencies is their rejection of the public in favor of the private. And to that extent, Trumpian populism is a radicalization of the neoliberal ethos. In the classical era of neoliberalism, from roughly 1991 to 2016, the general consensus was that the purpose of public institutions was to set the rules of the game of market competition and to provide a range of public goods — such as basic research, official statistics, and the conditions for turning young human beings into productive human capital — that market actors had no incentive to reliably provide. Already, the value of public goods and public knowledge was implicitly called into question. They were not ends in themselves, but means to economic growth. Indeed, they were often even viewed as necessary evils, and as many such public duties were entrusted to private profit-seeking entities as possible.
In our new populist moment, by contrast, even this notion of the public as the necessary handmaiden of private accumulation has been delegitimized. Public schools don’t exist to induct students into a shared secular democratic culture, for instance, but are treated as hired hands to provide parents with babysitting services and to inculcate only those values the parents favor. Public libraries are not treated as repositories of certified knowledge, but as reflections of whatever arbitrary values or beliefs the surrounding community happens to have. And public office is increasingly treated as a private possession — above all by Trump, who jokes that he should get a “do-over” because he faced too much opposition and scrutiny to fully enjoy his first term and who muses that perhaps he should not have agreed to leave office in January 2021 after all.
This preference for private power over against public goods goes hand-in-hand with the racism, sexism, xenophobia, and other oppressive views characteristic of the radical right. The unfettered exercise of private power will inevitably mean the reassertion of traditional forms of dominance in private life — the superiority of the man over his wife, the ownership of children by their parents, the various hierarchies of race, etc., etc. In reality, the neoliberal order was fully compatible with such hierarchies, which festered and worsened even as exceptional individuals from disadvantaged groups enjoyed spectacular success. But even that token representation was experienced as a humiliation by many of our fellow citizens — above all Trump himself, who first stormed onto the political scene to spread lies meant to delegitimize our first Black president and who arguably chose to run for president specifically because Obama mocked him in his remarks at the Presidential Correspondents’ Dinner.
Reaganite deregulation was ostensibly meant to unleash wealth creation. Trumpian deconstruction of the administrative state is meant to make sure that there’s no one who can tell the boss what to do — no one to give workers or customers or anyone else any leverage against the hierarchy of private domination. Something similar is going on with the destruction of any public consensus on a shared reality through algorithmic manipulation. Where before one might decry wasting money on “useless knowledge,” now the goal is to make sure no genuine learning or understanding occurs at all — by feeding everyone a customized stream of bullshit that targets their own personal weaknesses and insecurities, a tendency that LLM-generated text and images will surely only amplify.
On both these points, the Democrats are again poor messengers, because they don’t genuinely believe in public goods or the disinterested pursuit of knowledge. They remain neoliberal through and through, meaning that they can’t get past arguing that quality public schools actually help economic growth or that we need to learn stuff because it’s a knowledge economy — or whatever the fashionable corporate bullshit happens to be today. “Greening the economy will create jobs and help us compete against China!” Seriously: shut the fuck up.
3. It’s the Capitalism, Stupid!
We can fight these tendencies and create more livable conditions. People have done so in the past, to varying degrees of success. But all of these tendencies are intrinsic to capitalism. We may well be entering a new phase that will make us nostalgic for neoliberalism — a phase centered more on establishing economic autarky and zero-sum competitions between nations — but it’s still going to be capitalism, which means that it’s still going to be exploitative, racist, endlessly hungry from free reproductive labor, etc., etc. We can’t solve those problems in the long run with solutions that are fundamentally parasitical on capitalist production, such as the welfare state or universal basic income, even if they are financed through the vulgar online MMT magical thinking of “helicopter money.”
We need to figure out ways of organizing our communities and our values and our livelihoods in non-capitalist ways. That has been more or less off the table for a generation, in large part because the biggest large-scale experiment with doing that spectacularly collapsed and everyone decided that the system jerry-rigged between two world wars in a peasant society was the only possible way you could do anything other than capitalism. We need to stop letting our rejection of a society that is dead and gone (and that ever fewer people still alive even directly experienced) limit our imagination.
And we need to get the fuck off of social media as soon as possible. I know I am late to this game, having held out at Twitter way too long and then tried to make Bluesky work. The beginning of the end for me was a huge blow-up around a Financial Times column that averred that Bluesky was a liberal bubble, prompting much indignation. After I gave up actively contributing, I have occasionally taken a peek in there and — good grief, it is absolutely absurd. It’s like the liberal version of when we used to make fun of Fox News for suddenly lurching to Hillary Clinton’s ancient scandals while Trump’s trials were going on. The immense levels of cope, verging on the conspiratorial (one pollster in Iowa has figured out it’s going to be a Harris landslide), made me feel like I was on another planet.
We all need to read more — really read. We can’t keep getting our news in two-sentence bursts or trying to have serious discussions with decontextualized fragments. We need to keep some kind of intellectual culture alive, because public schools are dying and universities no longer care about such matters. We need to keep ahold of reality. Like Matthew Ellis — whose excellent post today I have had in the back of my mind as I wrote this — I would encourage you to read the financial press. I subscribe to the Financial Times currently, and find it refreshingly factual (complete with non-tendentious headlines, for my Bluesky bros!). I’ve subscribed to Bloomsburg Businessweek in the past and found it excellent. You would be unimaginably better informed if you just read one of those regularly and subscribed to the New Left Review than you will ever be from scrolling on social media.
We are in a really bad situation. I don’t know how to make it better, but I do know we need to stop making ourselves actively stupider.
To help promote my forthcoming book and to give me somewhere to put my many thoughts about Star Trek in general, I have started a new Substack, also entitled Late Star Trek. You can read the first post here.
I have been spending a lot more time thinking about logic and math than I ever would have anticipated even as recently as five years ago. I’ve read books that were essentially about the square root of two, or how many points are on a line, and my current train reading is a primer on non-Euclidean geometry. Meanwhile, formal logic has become a staple of my teaching, both in the philosophy department and in the Shimer Great Books program. And who do I have to thank for all of this? Hegel.
During the pandemic, I was part of an intense reading group on Hegel’s Science of Logic. I have seldom read a book so hard — reading the section for the next meeting (often as little as ten pages) multiple times over, poring over every page during our long discussions, even poking at the German text. It is well-known to be among the most challenging texts in the Western philosophical canon, and I found it to be among the most rewarding as well. I haven’t spent much time with the text since then, but it often feels like everything I do — or at least everything new in my teaching and reading — is somehow related to it. I initially volunteered to teach logic in the philosophy department both to prepare for the Shimer course on logic and math and to get a handle on the syllogism, which is so central for Hegel. I have increasingly been teaching history of science courses, and I am drawn to non-reductionist accounts of the emergence of life out of physics and chemistry that echo the final passages of the Science of Logic. I don’t know when or even whether I will ever have a level of expertise needed to write credibly on these subjects, but my encounter with Hegel has profoundly shaped the way I look at the world.
It has also shaped the way I teach logic. As I have grown more confident and fluent in my syllogisms, I have tried to give my students a sense of how and why they work — something that neither the Copi/Cohen or Hurley textbook is much concerned with. They just list the valid forms and provide a dense proof (which they all but invite the reader to skip) as to how all of them fulfill the syllogistic rules, which are in turn simply presented as brute facts to be memorized. By contrast, I try to show how all the forms are generated out of the famous Barbara (AAA-1) form, and why the figures other than the first are more limited in their range of possible valid conclusions. (An initial effort at such an explanation can be found in this post.) I don’t want them to simply recognize that the EIO form is valid in all figures, I want them to know why.
At the end of the day, though, this knowledge inevitably collapses into a merely mechanical memorized list. Once I created a kind of algorithm for how to generate the 15 unconditionally valid (or Boolean) forms, the list became a permanent possession for me. To get there, I spent many a walk to the train pondering the mysteries of three overlapping categories — once I “had it,” I lost all patience for further reflection. It became boring, inert.
That tendency is what Hegel is constantly fighting against in the Science of Logic. He wants to show us how logic emerges into life, and he injects genuine drama into the whole affair. Yet as we progressed through the massive tome, the past sections inevitably became subject to rote memorization: first Being, then Nothing, then Becoming, then Existence….. Remember, Quality comes before Quantity! Many people, including no less an authority than Jameson, will tell you that all you “really need” is the Encyclopedia Logic, but in that text, I feel that Hegel has already succumbed to the tendency toward mechanism. Each step becomes something to be rattled off, without bothering so much with the connective tissue. Symptomatic here is the conversion of the “Remarks” — so energetic and tightly argued in the Science of Logic, beginning with scornful and even sarcastic attack on anyone who would deny that Being and Nothingness are the same — into the more disconnected “riffs” (my translation of the German Zusätze) in the Encyclopedia Logic‘s lecture notes.
I keep trying to forestall that moment by giving myself fresh challenges — for instance, trying to teach basic logic directly “out of” Aristotle’s original texts, which is… super hard. I also continue to delve more and more into the project of modern logic and its interpentration with mathematics. In part this is to help my teaching in the Shimer course, which requires me to find a way to help the students through the difficult territory of non-Euclidean geometry or Gödel’s Proof. But in part it’s also to confirm my intuition that the entire project is, in a very real sense, insane. And not only that, but the most fervently held desire — namely, to develop a completely rigorous, self-contained, and autonomous axiomatic system with no necessary grounding in intuition or any external reality — has been rigorously proven to be impossible on its own terms.
Hegel’s approach to logic is often regarded as self-evidently misguided in modern terms, and a whole literature has arisen trying to “save” Hegel through a reductionist reading. The reason is that, from the outset, Hegel is clearly breaking some of the most basic rules of contemporary logic. Above all, he repeatedly violates the existential fallacy (indeed, that is one of his very first moves). Hegel died shortly before the Boolean revolution got underway, but I think it’s obvious that he would have rejected its terms completely. The purpose of logic isn’t to create a purely self-sufficient abstract system, but to found our understanding of the world, which we cannot finally understand without presuming that it is in some sense proto-logical “in itself.”
This is not to say that nature is governed by abstract “laws” or that it has an inherently “mathematical” structure. The concepts we use to grasp nature always have to be won through the struggle of our own understanding — they do not come ready-made. Indeed, I think Hegel would agree with Lee Smolin that the remarkable effectiveness of mathematical tools in grasping the natural world is grounded in the humble fact that at every level we know of, nature presents itself as an ensemble of discreet entities that we can count.
Hegel lived a bit too early to put it this way, but I would say that our logical categories cannot be divorced from our empirical intuitions because our minds evolved out of our natural environment in order to grasp it. Pretending otherwise — no matter how complex and rigorous the results — collapses into contradiction and, worse, triviality.
Even so, I do mostly stick to the Boolean system of syllogisms for the sake of my teaching, because there’s only so much world and time. And in case you’re curious, here is my method for generating the fifteen unconditionally valid forms. First, I presume that you have the forms in the first figure memorized, which is easy enough because they’re all pretty intuitive (see the above-linked post for more of an explanation):
AAA-1
EAE-1
AII-1
EIO-1
Then, starting again from AAA-1, you list out the same forms horizontally, incrementing the figure on each one:
AAA-1
EAE-2
AII-3
EIO-4
EAE-1
AII-1
EIO-1
In the second and third column, you then write a form with the premises reversed, and you add those “new” forms to the fourth column, incrementing the figure to 4 for each.
AAA-1
EAE-2
AII-3
EIO-4
EAE-1
AEE-2
IAI-3
AEE-4
AII-1
IAI-4
EIO-1
Returning to the second and third columns, continue both down by replacing the non-A lines with Os.
AAA-1
EAE-2
AII-3
EIO-4
EAE-1
AEE-2
IAI-3
AEE-4
AII-1
AOO-2
OAO-3
IAI-4
EIO-1
Complete the list by adding EIO to any column that doesn’t already have it:
AAA-1
EAE-2
AII-3
EIO-4
EAE-1
AEE-2
IAI-3
AEE-4
AII-1
AOO-2
OAO-3
IAI-4
EIO-1
EIO-2
EIO-3
And there you have it! Once you have this technique down, you will have the 15 valid forms in the bag and never need to think about it again!
A curious thing has been happening lately: I cannot use the popular left-leaning social networking site Bluesky for any length of time without becoming irritable and even angry. Every common trope annoys me. Most notably, if someone nitpicks a headline in the New York Times — one of the favorite forms of political activism over there — I jump down their throats. I get into pointless, hostile, endless back-and-forth exchanges where we both dig in more and more. Often one leads to the other. For instance, this morning I blocked a longtime mutual (and fellow academic) after a terrible fight about whether the NYT has appropriately used the word “mused” in a headline.
Clearly I’m part of the problem here! I could simply attempt to curate my experience more — set up lists, follow “starter packs,” and do all the many fun things that other users do to get things “just so” — but every time I do, the bullshit keeps coming back. My biggest success was blocking a major user who is obsessed with NYT nitpicking, and for a few weeks it seemed like he had been the only culprit. But it always comes back, just like the constant exhortations to block without mercy or hesitation keep coming back, just like everything keeps coming back. And that probably happens because Bluesky is, at the end of the day, a very small and insular site, whose culture of boastful hair-trigger blocking contributes to major groupthink.
The beginning of my more sustained frustration came early last week, when the entire site was aghast at a Financial Timescolumn that said Bluesky was an echo chamber. I have been using a print subscription to the Financial Times as part of my efforts to wean myself off social media and have come to deeply respect it as a news source. Everyone was outraged at the FT’s “attack” on the site, and some journalists and editors even popped up on Bluesky to try to mediate the conflict. Multiple major accounts advocated blocking all the supposed “gaslighters” from what is, in all honesty, probably the best English-language news source on Earth.
I was aghast. I don’t much care for the columnist, nor did I think the column was a work of art. But everyone seemed to be mischaracterizing its point — which boiled down to “I get why liberals like Bluesky, but I miss the broader perspective Twitter had before Musk ruined it.” Again, not brilliant, but hardly a war crime. In fact, I’m pretty sure that most Bluesky users, deep in their hearts, would agree. And for “defending” the column (i.e., attempting to accurately summarize it), I was insulted and targetted for blocking. One person mused that I was trying to suck up to the columnist so I could hobknob with her wealthy friends. Another thought my response was par for the course for a “tank-adjacent contrarian.” The notion that I sincerely thought everyone was overreacting based on inaccurate information was not considered.
A big part of the problem is that we are all, of course, recovering from the trauma of late-stage Twitter. We are taking habits honed in an environment overrun by open Nazis and applying it to people whose politics are, at the end of the day, all within one standard deviation of each other. And that’s fine! There is definitely a place for people with similar politics to meet. That’s what I try to cultivate on Facebook especially, and I certainly didn’t seek out conservatives on the old Twitter. The problem is that no one is willing to admit that it’s an echo chamber. They want to imagine it’s an miscellaneous audience, that their critiques of NYT headlines can reach some reachable moderate, or that their exhortations that no one should blame North Carolina and Tennessee for the hurricane damage just because they’re red states could be heard by someone who may indeed be tempted to blame them. It’s like a “seeker-sensitive” church, always looking to convert outsiders who mostly aren’t interested and meanwhile providing nothing of substance to those who are showing up consistently.
I’ll admit that the old Twitter was often annoying in the same way. It did periodically bring out an unattractive combativeness in me. And sometimes it seemed like it could become actually life-threatening, as in my multiple waves of systematic right-wing harassment. But it had other rewards. There was much more genuine intellectual diversity among left-wing posters. There was much greater chance of stumbling across interesting links and articles or hearing about something cool. And it was funny — funny like nothing else. There was just something about the meme culture of Twitter at its prime, with its multiple layers of referentiality and irony, its nihilistic love of the absurd. Even in the late days of Twitter people were becoming more literal and less receptive to that kind of humor, but on Bluesky it’s entirely dead. The absurdist poster “dril” made a big show of switching to Bluesky and people took his nonsensical posts deadly seriously, sometimes even going so far as to report him for harmful content. I myself get a very literal response to almost every joke I post. It’s heartbreaking.
It’s as though everyone decided to take my article Jury Duty, where I said that the purpose of social media is primarily to pass judgment on each other, as an instruction manual for building out the new culture of Bluesky. The constant reminders that everyone is on a hair trigger to block every stranger exacerbate the effect, to the point where it feels like the first social network whose primary purpose is actually to cut off social contact.
When I ask myself why I let it get to me, it is probably because I am still grieving for what Twitter was. It didn’t always bring out the best in me, but it was rewarding on net, because it was so often surprising. That’s what’s so frustrating to me about the endless repetition of a handful of moves — it’s so predictable. I get angry at the NYT headline nitpickers because they’re boring, and because they’ve convinced themselves that it’s politically necessary for them to be boring. In reality, though, the recipients for the messages they insist on sending out so repetitiously are not here. I am. Or at least I was. I know I was annoying, I know I had my hangups, I know I often disagreed with the site consensus — but I am a human being, I am genuinely open to discussion, and I admit when I’m wrong much more often than anyone else I’ve ever seen online. All I wanted out of the site was some kind of halfway interesting discussions and links and jokes. I don’t think that was too much to ask.
Whether I will return again remains to be seen. As a long-time Twitter addict, I’m likely to relapse. I publicly pledged myself to take a week off, just to make it embarrassing to come back sooner. But what makes it less likely is the sense that no one will miss me. I pop into Twitter every week or so to check my replies and see if I have any DMs, and every so often I see someone saying that they miss me and wish they would return. By contrast, Bluesky has felt hostile and unwelcoming from the very start. I know that hurt people, hurt people. I’m guilty of that as well. I just wish we could all work through it and try to build something that can be more informative, more challenging, and more fun — and I’m increasingly convinced that will never happen.
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