The Neoliberals

Tony Blair and Bill Clinton listen to the concerns of a constituent.

Nobody takes Trump seriously. He’s not coherent enough to be take literally, but he should definitely be taken seriously. But nobody does. Everyone is comfortable enough in their own life that even now, Trump is still just an abstract idea. His authoritarianism is a true story, but almost nobody feels the truth of it in their personal lives. People take it seriously enough to get mad about it on the internet, which isn’t serious at all. Trump isn’t radicalizing anybody. Politics in America is still just business as usual. At least for everybody but Trump.

You might say that Trump supporters have been radicalized, but not really. Trump supporters in the White House have been, and the psychos on Twitter, but the vast majority of people are still just standard Republicans. Tariffs aside, they see Trump as finally doing what the RINOs never did. Cutting taxes and deregulating. The only thing RINOs ever do. But they don’t do it enough. Now that Trump is really, really doing it, it’s finally going to work.

I know that Democrats think your average Trump voter is a Nazi, but that’s nonsense. Americans aren’t that ideological. They’re anti-ideological because America’s core identity has become anti-communism. But they don’t even really know what that means. Other than cut taxes and deregulate. It’s just business as usual for almost everybody.

You’d think Democrats might start radicalizing at least a little bit, but that’s not happening. Most of them are comfortable. Most of them are complacent, even if they seem mad on the internet. They’re still very fond of Kamala. No introspection at all. Not a thought given to what current events mean for America ten years in the future. Or twenty.

Midterms.

I don’t even know what the hell that’s supposed to do. Are they going to have hearings? Lol. What is there to investigate? Trump is openly corrupt. He is openly defiant of the constitution. It doesn’t matter. People barely even care. Democrats barely even care. They get mad on the internet. They just want Mayor Pete to be president so they can rub it in Elon’s face. Or whatever. Open the borders. Everybody loves immigration now that Trump has been such a dick about it. Check the polls. You’ll see. Do a focus group.

Trump and his Twitter militia are an island of radicalization in a sea of status quo. This would be understandable if congress hadn’t handed the powers of taxation and war over to the president. There would only be so much he could do without these powers, so it wouldn’t really be that big a deal. But they gave up that power. So what about that? Does that bother anybody? Does anybody think that Democrats and Republicans using legislation to alter the balance of power in our republic was a bad idea? Is anybody even mad about that on the internet?

President Macron gave a speech recently at the Masonic Great Lodge of France. In it, he talked about the Dark Enlightenment. I talked about this in The Accelerationists. The Dark Enlightenment is the ideology of the tech bros who threw in with Trump. It’s interesting that somebody like Macron would talk about this. 90s internet bloggers have come a long way. But the way Macron talks about it is the most revealing thing. The core of the Dark Enlightenment is about capitalism itself. Capitalism not just as the economic system of the world, but as the governing force of humanity. Macron doesn’t talk about any of that. Macron characterizes it as a theocratic ideology. He essentially labels it Christian nationalism. This isn’t what it is. He knows about the Dark Enlightenment, and he must certainly have at least a Wikipedia level understanding of it, so why not call it out for what it really is?

Macron is one of the superstars of neoliberalism. He’s an Obama. A Clinton. A Blair. In a sense, he’s the last man standing. And he’s just barely keeping upright. He’s been using every trick in the book to stay in power. First, calling elections. Then, when his party lost, refusing to give up power. Now he’s gotten Le Pen banned from running for office. The neoliberal project is on it’s back foot. Except for maybe in the UK where Thatcherism is in full (rotting) bloom. But where Starmer is a wet blanket, Macron is a star. Marcon is the global representative of the Clinton/Bush/Blair project. He carries their message to the world.

The latest message would seem to be that the Dark Enlightenment is theocratic fascism. He spoke about this in the context of the 1905 law which is France’s version of separation of church and state. But the overall speech was an appeal to the idea of assisted dying. That’s the thing that kind of ties it all together for me. Assisted dying is a militantly secular idea that would very much fit in with the values of the Dark Enlightenment. Peter Thiel would gladly pay for the bullet if you want to remove yourself from the ranks of low human capital. Macron has to separate neoliberalism from the Dark Enlightenment. The goals are not dissimilar. The Dark Enlightenment is about corporate fascism and neoliberalism is about corporatism. The only real difference is that corporatism leaves the illusion of democracy in place.

In a sense we’re seeing Macron try to distance himself from himself. It’s a tough maneuver, but the political method he’s using is simple enough to follow. The Christian theocrats actually have aligned themselves with the accelerationists, so it’s easy to say that they are one and the same. He can just skip over the core issue which is capitalism itself. But there’s also the issue of the tech bros who he feels he needs to appease. These are the money makers, and money is what counts. He’s not saying they are bad, he’s saying that the people they’ve aligned themselves with are bad. We can jump back over to this side of the pond to see this. Democrats are loath to say anything negative about Bezos or Zuckerberg. Even an ostensibly progressive Democrat like Ro Khanna is overly deferential to Silicon Valley. For Democrats and their counterparts around the world, money is still king.

This is why Trump isn’t radicalizing anybody. The king is the one who you radicalize against. Trump isn’t king. He’s just a representative of an incoherent ideology. The ideology is incoherent because the rank and file and the leaders are actually at odds. The rank and file just doesn’t know it. But the ideology is also incoherent because nobody in supposed opposition to it can accurately describe it. Curtis Yarvinism basically just means that rich people rule. Democrats don’t fundamentally disagree with this. The thing they disagree on is method. Democrats believe that a system where rich people pick other rich people who are then confirmed by the masses is a more stable (profitable) system than a monarchical system. They can’t actually say that though. But they also can’t say that the rich people are the problem because the rich people are who they actually represent.

The thing about all this is that it doesn’t actually matter if Democrats are correct in their ideological adherence to a specific type of political economy. Maybe it really is the best that half-intelligent primates can manage. All you can do is keep profits up at the expense of wages, otherwise the whole thing collapses and everybody is worse off. The problem with that position is that people will just vote for Trump. And Trump will make another system. Like Nixon did in 71.

It’s funny how that works. Nixon dropped his bomb on the world without warning too. And it was done. Then Carter carried on with it, then Reagan, Bush, Clinton. And so on in that fashion until another Republican comes along and decides we’re going to have a new system. He can do that because the people want a new system. They’ve had it with Nixon’s.

I don’t know if Trump can actually remake the economic system. I don’t know if he is even aware of the possibilities. But the project 2025 folks seem to think they can do it. The only thing I know for sure is that they are going to make things worse for normal people. And Democrats don’t even care. They’re the same as they’ve always been. Republicans will remake our economic system, and Democrats will spend the next 50 years championing that system.

Welcome to the Chinese Century.