Today marks the day that Mr. Donald Trump wanders off and Mr. Joe Biden wanders on. I'm thinking about how terrible the language and movements of the left have been rendered under this administration. Pushed into paroxisms of submission, made to behave, framed as pro establishment. It has been the dream of the militia and the fascists. Donald Trump is not a fascist. He is fascist as in we should see his presidency as a verb, a fascist action, a ledge upon which fascist insurgency took place. He was useful because he grew up on a strict diet of positivity. The negative is not allowed in this house. Negativity is this dreadful thing to be purged and hated and shunned. Whereas the neo conservatives hoisted themselves into their empire under the pretext that terrorism ('radical islamic tm') was the worst thing in the world, Trump came ready prepared with this libidinal hatred of an abstraction called negativity. This kind of void can be charged any which way it is required, like a member of a cult. Meaning is emptied out to be replaced by belief: Belief in abstract forces and energies. Energies like positivity, success and perhaps most crucially competition. These energies come to replace the functions they are imgined usually to serve. Competition no longer pretends to have any anchor in reality: Nobody is competing to see who is best for the job, the competition measures who is the best at competing, because competition is the best thing in the world; the Godhead and the driving force, the conclusion of the management directive. It was smart of the Trump administration to gather together the haters of communism, gunheads, militias, preppers, neo nazis, reactionaries and patriots. They've never come together in such force and jubilation. Only abstraction can do this. The self criticising corners of the left have been immobilised by forty or so years of hard failure, and that failure echoes in its more unified mainstreams. The right on the other hand (and yes, I do think these terms are still useful and have their meanings, whether or not we would rather it be so) have been doing incredibly well. They continue to do so by following the void, many of them knowing it can't be filled up. Many do not. It doesn't matter. An unfillable void has irresistable traction. Tommy Robinson is a hardcore example of this. A cocaine snorting grifter and a seething family man. Someone for whom there has to be fury, whose comedowns are the forward momentum. Language has mobilised in this hard right insurgency by emptying itself out. Once you stop worrying about the meanings of things (and consequences) you can move freely, like the fantasy markets. Magical thinking can and will make meanings and consequences disappear. Like praying against your neighbours.
