Identification: Virulent Pathogen
“Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.”
– Louis Althusser
Although Americans are divided over how good or how bad President Donald J. Trump is, people elsewhere ask one question: “How did Americans elect this man twice?”
Regardless of the day-to-day estimates of how many Americans are adamant hard-core Trump MAGA class, and how rallying cries of power with the People and not Trump grow each day, neither side has landed a knockout punch. It’s an even bet whether Trump’s head will go on Mt. Rushmore or he’ll be wearing orange in the Alcatraz of the Rockies.
If we apply Althusser’s definition of ideology, what we have in the U.S. are widely different imaginary relationships to the real conditions of existence, that is, verifiable conditions on the ground. As a Marxist, Althusser views capitalism as the creator of those imaginary conditions. In other words, a profit nexus (Carlyle) to the world masters and overwhelms other views, subscribing to an imaginary in which “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” That’s The Communist Manifesto, 1848. That relationship with the real never caught on in the U.S, whether because it ignored real conditions, or because another imaginary, ROI (return on investment) better suited these “real” conditions. My own postmodernist view questions our capacity to reach and represent outside imaginative frameworks these real conditions that all materialist views capitalist and anti-capitalist hold. There is a competitive battle here to persuade that one narrative (before postmod called an argument) is closer to reality and truth than another.
Let’s now say there was such contention before Trump’s regime. But not now. He has scrapped any attempt to argue truth or reality, or see the need to do so when lies get him to where he wants to go. He has unwittingly jumped to Baudrillard’s final stage of the formation of the Hyperreal in which we move in four stages to a final hyperreality which has no relation to reality but is pure simulacra. Not by reading Baudrillard but by little by little seeing what he could get away with, by which I mean how far could he go from what was clearly the case without a general outcry of “I Call Bullshit!” did Trump advance. Success here came not simply from Goebbels repeat and repeat and Karl Rove’s repeat with volume but from our own inherent powerlessness in nailing down what is real and true with words, or any signifying, and so expose Trump’s fraudulence in an unimpeachable way.
However unable we are to put forth an unimpeachable narrative as to what the real conditions of existence are, we yet live within a deep historical legacy of what we have held to be true. Americans live within a cultural imaginary out of which a recognizable order exists. Trump is at war with that. And right now the closer he comes in his words and deeds to becoming what an historical order has been shaped to resist, the more certain is it that he’s identified as an virulent pathogen.
So, one part of an answer to the question my European friends ask, we have elected this man to the presidency twice because not enough voters in two elections could identify what he so transparently was. Neither could he until it became clear to him that he could really shoot somebody and wouldn’t lose any voters. He was from the start clearly bigoted, racist and full of hate which were his default imperatives. What became his hardshell MAGA followers never felt the power of a resisting imaginary which, though always spotty, would have known what Donald J. Trump was on first sight. That didn’t happen and it hasn’t happened for these followers.
He was their champion, but against what? The immiserating destructiveness of a Market Rule economic system? Not at all. The country was browning and whites would lose their own country. The “Deep State” bureaucracy was taking away personal freedom, indoctrinating your children in “Government Schools.” Liberal degenerate elites were knocking family values, vilifying God’s truth, and denying America’s greatness. It must be faced that an obtuseness to what this democratic order offered them, a blindness to struggles and hardships elsewhere, has made this MAGA hardshell core unable to identify Trump as an infectious pathogen to that order. Also, to be faced is the fact that a strong part of the American historical register and legacy is itself a malignant response to all manner of difference. There’s a unity in hatred to which Trump appealed. I see no reason to believe that goes when he goes.
What keeps those not drunk the Kool-Aid from turning against Trump? I’d say fear of what Trump can do to a career, followed by real fear of what angry MAGAs might do if Trump triggers them. We cannot forget that the violent lunatics of January 6th were all pardoned and are now Trump’s loyal army. We can see them in videos of ICE, facing off with protesters, sometimes shooting them. Until MAGA is reduced to just these January 6th gang, MAGA is Trump’s leverage. When those numbers dwindle and so won’t help Republicans win elections, Republicans will turn against Trump. He’ll be toxic to them. It may be clear to the Wall St. financial sector that Trump’s anti-globalism is too big a price to pay, and so they turn against him. Less certain is how the tech AI crypto industry will respond to open Trump resistance, as Trump and his family are now tied to that industry.
Why isn’t resistance on an equal energy level to Trump’s blitzkrieg assault? Caught flatfooted is the expression. Michael Wolff makes it clear: politicians were doing politics within a format of protocols, rules, and courtesies that Trump just walked all over. So, they couldn’t identify what exactly he was. Journalists raised questions and got lies in response. Here are the facts but Trump gives them alternative facts. Confrontation was not what non-Reality TV reporters do. But they do it on Fox and social media. And in those spots, it’s not the pathogen being confronted but the scientists who identify him as such, just as pedophiles aren’t confronted but their victims/survivors, or ICE murderer not investigated but the ones they murdered.
Because the Democratic Party gave Trump the bullets he could shoot them with, that Party could not be imagined as serious. At his lowest rating in the polls, Trump still outperforms the Democrats. The Power of the People protesting in ICE-invasion cities could churn up votes against Republicans in the November elections. They may also become harder and face a military deployment as Trump uses the Insurrection Act, all of which in turn may overdetermine the elections in ways we cannot foresee. It’s not difficult to see that, still unrestrained, untrained and armed, ICE will kill again, and videos will reach every cell phone.
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