The Triumph of the Cultural Mainstream and The Decline of the American Empire
Here's a "personality quiz" of sorts for you:
(1) Which film released in 2010 did you enjoy more: (1) Unstoppable or (2) Alice in Wonderland? Or if you didn't see either, which do you think (based on Wikipedia descriptions and posters) you would enjoy more?
(2) Which song released in 2023 did you enjoy more: (1) Last Night by Morgan Wallern or (2) anti-hero by Taylor Swift?
(3) Which television show released in 2015 did you enjoy more: (1) The Big Bang Theory or (2) NCIS?
(4) Knowing nothing more, you are asked to choose between watching either (1) a new Adam Sandler film, or (2) a new Lin-Manual Miranda musical. Which do you pick?
(5) You can choose between watching two shows tonight, (1) a Law & Order series featuring a tough-as-nails black woman as lead prosecutor, or (2) an episode of The Celebrity Apprentice. Which would you enjoy more?
Congratulations: if you can answer these questions, you now know whether you should vote for Donald Trump or Kamala Harris.
There is No Politics
Did you watch the DNC? What did you think of Mindy Kaling's speech?
Did you watch the RNC? Did you see Hulk Hogan take his shirt off?
Did you know that JD Vance and Donald Trump are Weird? Did you know that Kamala is Brat?
Did you know that you can go to collecttrumpcards.com and receive with your NFT purchase a free set of golden sneakers imprinted with the image of the former President's near-assassination from a month ago?
Did you know that the Vice-Presidential nominee for the Republic Party is the author of the book that inspired the movie that is currently at the top of Netflix streaming charts?
Did you know who Kamala Harris was a month ago? Did you watch the Celebrity Apprentice during its ratings peak? Does Tim Walz remind you of your father? Did you buy a Trump Mug Shot t-shirt?
Politics? What politics?
There is no politics in 2024. There is only the Cultural Mainstream.
The Political Mainstream
If you have been reading intelligent thinkpieces from intelligent people writing for intelligent news and opinion services, you no doubt are quite aware what the primary threat to American democracy is. Radicalism! The Radical Left. The MAGA terrorists. Weird people, weird political stances, weird subcultures, from the bowels of the Internet, espousing unAmerican ideas, supporting the Russians and the Chinese. Election-riggers. Election-deniers. Insulting the flag and assaulting the Capitol. Attacking democracy. Communists. Authoritarians.
Alas, I can only say, to all these intelligent, sincere people, that this is the exact opposite of the truth. I, quite sincerely, wish that the actual threat to American democracy at the moment came from strange people with sincerely-held but extreme and marginal political philosophies: for that would mean that we were, in fact, living in a democracy, and a decently healthy one at that. As a matter of fact, there has never been less political diversity in American life than at this precise moment. There has never been less political radicalism in American life than at this precise moment.
It was not always thus. The 2016 election represented a watershed moment for many people, on the Internet and off, who can only be described as Weird: weird in many different dimensions and on many different axes, but among other things genuinely radical and outside of the norm of American political life. Leftism, racialism, communism, integralism, post-liberalism, and many other odd projects put together by odd people, deliberately against the grain of the main traditions of American political life, proliferated and even gained the support or at least the acknowledgment of important people in educational and political institutions. Harvard Law School professor Adrian Vermeule became an integralist. Obama read Patrick Deneen's book. Kanye West ran for President on a Christian-nationalist racial-justice platform. Old-school Leftist Bernie Sanders in America, and old-school Leftist Jeremy Corbyn in Britain, became memes and threatened to take over parties long since sold to centrist liberals. And so on.
It is not, as they say, 2016 anymore. All of these movements are now, without exception, even less popular and impactful than they were in 2015--if they even still exist. The "Alt-Right," that largely fictitious movement largely created by Hillary Clinton, is now a constellation of small-time social media influencers who spend all their time attacking each other or else supporting mainstream candidates. Richard Spencer has spent the last four years fervently supporting Joe Biden while trying to start an Apollo cult on Twitter. Catholic online integralism fractured into normie Leftists who prattle about housing policy and tell you to vote for Biden and normie Rightists who prattle about birth rates and tell you to vote for Trump (or maybe Viktor Orban). Kanye West got divorced, remarried, and started cursing again. Jeremy Corbyn? Bernie Sanders? What am I talking about?
Of course, the seeds of this downfall were there from the very beginning; especially insofar as the immediate seeds of all these movements were (1) the Internet, and (2) Donald Trump.
What the 2016 moment, in retrospect, actually represented was nearly the opposite of a burst of political energy and creativity to radically alter American institutions. Rather, 2016 was the moment when the Internet simply became mainstream--among which oddities were the habit of people online espousing various odd and radical political ideologies. The Internet c. 2010 was dominated, by and large, by weirdos: and then, somewhere around 2015-2016, everyone got on the Internet and started reading those weirdos. Your mother started following someone called WokeSpaceJesuit and quoting his political opinions. Your grandmother started reposting Nazi art accounts' paintings of blond women in wheat fields. Your grandfather started watching Tucker Carlson and talking about Woke Capitalism.
For a moment, all these weirdos genuinely believed that they were gaining power; that they were on the verge of taking over America, winning the culture war, the dream of every weird American subculture since the Evangelical movement; and they believed, like the Evangelicals before them, that if they won the culture war they would win the political war too, and take over the political institutions, and hold in their hands the levers of the American Empire, the greatest cultural-political-economic Empire the world has ever seen, and so rule the world, forever.
Some of these scenarios were in fact possible to very limited degrees--most were not. In any case, that's not what happened. What happened, rather--what had already happened in 2016 itself!--was nearly the opposite. Instead of holding the levers of power, the weirdos and radicals of the Internet, more or less without exception, obediently got behind the existing institutions and the existing powers and handed over the keys to the cultural mainstream.
The Internet, it turns out, is not radical; the Internet is, at the present writing, largely a constellation of 3-5 publicly-traded media corporations, each of which maintains at great expense a small constellation of content websites and apps and uses them to steal personal information and run targeted ads. Weirdos with weird opinions play a small but vital role in maintaining the content pipeline for these websites--just as they did for television and, before that, radio, though to a larger extent--but they no more have control over or genuine influence through those platforms than Patrick Buchanan dominated American politics because of his role as host of CNN's Crossfire.
Very similarly, after all these years of Donald Trump content, Donald Trump memes, Donald Trump thinkpieces about Donald Trump thinkpieces about Donald Trump thinkpieces, I remain utterly amazed, dumbfounded, and (I sadly admit) annoyed by the continual insistence of people on the Right and Left of America like that Donald Trump has or represents or stands for or has something to do with some kind of radical politics, whether that is imagined as standing up for the common people of American and American values and telling it like it is or whether that is imagined as imitating Vladmir Putin and bringing Fascism and authoritarianism and racism to America.
Donald Trump, even in 2016, was the least political and least radical candidate that a major party in America has ever run: which is, given how apolitical American public life has genuinely been over the past 50 years, a remarkable accomplishment.
Donald Trump is not an outsider; Donald Trump is not Weird: Donald Trump is the cultural mainstream.
This is a man who got famous playing himself on TV, who has been referenced in more hip-hop songs, since the birth of the genre, than any other, who was being made the topic of stale jokes in sitcoms in the 1980s, who was considered so blandly mainstream and inoffensive in 1992 that he cameoed in Home Alone 2. If you traced the vast web of Donald Trump references and media appearances across the vast variety of shows, platforms, advertisements, music, video, television, films, etc, since his rise to fame in the 1980s, you would have an almost completely comprehensive precis of what has been considered culturally mainstream for the last thirty years of American cultural life.
The trap, in other words, was there from the very beginning: and the trap is simply this: that culture has overtaken and devoured politics. What made Donald Trump strange is not that he was a political radical who achieved mainstream political success: what made him strange is that he was a mainstream cultural figure who achieved mainstream political success.
Americans, to their credit, had managed for quite some time to keep the political mainstream distinct from the cultural mainstream, at least notionally. The President of the United States has also, since Reagan, largely been engaged in playing himself on TV; but he was expected to play himself in a rather different register, with a rather different set of cultural and aesthetic markers, than other popular figures on television. Where they were allowed to be flamboyant, he was supposed to be somber; where they were expected to be weird, extravagant, grotesque, larger than life, he was supposed to be dignified, restrained, a Serious Man in a black suit declaiming bland English sentences in the tone and timbre otherwise reserved for prep-school teachers and the narrators of PBS News specials.
The remote origins of the Trump phenomenon and the accompanying triumph of the Cultural Mainstream was without a doubt the overtly media-driven, vague, and messianic campaign run by Barack Obama in 2008. I am old enough to remember that campaign, and how off-putting the religious fervor it elicited and fed on was after eight years of George W Bush's somber manufactured good-ol'-boy act.
Still, though there can be no question that Obama won largely on the basis of mainstream mass-media constructions, he did so in a recognizably "political" register: not daytime television, but The West Wing. Even his grandest and most Messianic rhetoric about hope and change and "We are the ones we've been waiting for" was delivered with precisely the measured tone and lack of emotion of a college science lecturer; and it was accompanied, to his credit, with a great deal of highly technical policy recommendations and prescriptions and promises.
Many of his fervent followers, it is true, valued these recommendations more for the overall effect of smartness and competence and technicity they projected than for their actual content; and virtually none of them were actually fulfilled once Obama was in office. Still, the basic barrier remained; there was a political mainstream, which was also cultural and mass-media-based, and there was a cultural mainstream, which was also mass-media-based and political; and never the twain shall meet.
In the years that followed, it is true, this began to break down a little; in particular during the 2012 election, when Obama was forced to run for re-election despite having failed to accomplish almost anything he had promised. Unable to appeal to Messianic rhetoric anymore, he nonetheless stuck with the professorial tone and appeal of technicity; and was run against a candidate that gave a somewhat wilder-eyed and slimier version of the same affect, baked in Mormonism and hucksterism and finance capital and free-market advertising ideology.
Mitt Romney was closer to mainstream advertising culture than anyone since Reagan; and to counter this threat, Obama's political men began to insist he appeal to the new, rising Internet cultural mavens for support. I treasure, and will always treasure, the moment in human history when Barack Obama, the sitting President of the United States, was forced to appear on weirdo Internet comedian Zach Galifianikis' weird Internet webseries Between Two Ferns: a trainwreck occuring in real time, with neither the professorial Obama nor the improvisational Galifianakis having any idea what to say or do.
Still, for all that, the Trump revolution was a real revolution, even if it was driven by much more fundamental and long-standing revolutions in American political and media life: mass-media culture, television, advertising, the Internet. It was Trump who really and truly breached the line between political mass-media and cultural mass-media; between the political and cultural mainstreams. Now, all is one.
Looking back from 2024 over the past ten years, we can say simply: the mainstream won. The political and religious and economic radicals did not win the culture war; the culture war won them. They obediently took their ideas, and translated them into the new, prevailing post-Trump ethos for American media and communication and discourse and politics. And that ethos, taken from Trump and now used by everyone on both Right and Left, is simply politics as lifestyle brand.
There is no more politics in America; now, on both the Right and the Left, there is only the cultural mainstream.
The Main Stream and its Tributaries
To understand modern American life, you have to understand one thing: the mainstream devours everything. And the mainstream is weirder than any subculture.
"Mainstream" is, if you think about it, an exceptionally odd term to apply to culture; indeed, it is, in basic linguistic roots, nearly the opposite of the concept implied by the term "culture."
"Culture," like many words, is at root a metaphor: human culture is what is cultivated, by analogy with farming; it is also what is worshiped, by analogy with cult. Cultivation is laborious; it takes time and energy and effort to plow and to sow and to plant and to reap; and then to take the fruits of that labor and further preserve, process, pickle and can and cook and weave and build them. For much of human civilization, culture was at root not even a metaphor, but merely an extension of the more basic sense of the word; the things that come from human cultivation are simply the stuff, the materials of human culture.
"Mainstream," though, represents an entirely different metaphor and an entirely different conception. A river flows from one place to another, all in the same direction, going from who knows where to no one knows, inexorable. In the river, there is water; and this water is, as Heraclitus pointed out, forever changing, never the same. You never step into the same mainstream twice.
Nor, indeed, do you step into the same subculture twice. The mainstream, after all, is not the whole of the river; it is only the main stream. On its inexorable journey to the sea, water may divert into a hundred different smaller channels, stagnate, slow down, and then just as frequently speed up again and rejoin the mainstream.
The relative puzzle of this metaphor is to say what, precisely, actually distinguishes the mainstream from the subsidiary streams. They are both made up of water, moving and perpetually changing; they both emerge from the same sources, and move in precisely the same direction, towards the same goal. Generally speaking, only two things fundamentally distinguish subculture from mainstream; if you are in the mainstream, the volume of water is greater; and the mainstream moves much, much faster.
This is, speaking frankly, as good as an image as any for the current epoch of symbolic mass-media culture, what I have called the reign of "content": ever-changing, indistinguishable, meaningless symbolic-binary nodules of information "streaming" to you live day and night, in the news or on television or on social media. Unlike "culture," people do not, and indeed cannot, create it themselves; they cannot buy some land, start a farm, grow corn, and bake cornbread. They can only drink from the river, coming from somewhere else and going somewhere else; or, better yet, dive in, and let the streaming content carry them away.
This metaphor also shows very clearly what a "subculture" in the current Internet and mass-media sense actually means, and what actually distinguishes it from the mainstream. From Evangelicism to gaming to BDSM, these media subcultures are simply tributaries of the whole. They do not invent their own models, their own aesthetics, their own editing styles, their own mediums, their own platforms, or increasingly even their own content: they merely draw all these things from the mainstream, making their own "weirder" versions of mainstream culture, usually at a much slower rate and about five to ten years behind prevailing mainstream trends.
By comparison with the overwhelming flood of mainstream content they are merely streams; but the interesting thing, the thing that has again and again happened and will continue to happen, is that the flow is not merely one way. The subcultures very commonly end up flowing back into the mainstream; at which point, regardless of their origins, all becomes mainstream again.
If you look at the mainstream cultural trends of the last few decades, a great many of them in fact originated with what were at the time small, strange subcultures. Evangelicism innovated a style of passionate, upbeat rhetoric and cultural memefication of content ("Drink Jesus," etc) that, while it was drawn from existing mainstream cultural models, went much farther and has been largely adopted by mainstream actors by this point. Gamers invented a streaming plus VOD model of content that has now been adopted by virtually everyone, including major film studios, as the primary method of content delivery.
Nor is this, of course, at all new, but rather ultimately a reflection of the basic sectarian plus mainline structure of American religion, which I have spoken of elsewhere. As far back as the 19th century, weirdos, relatively speaking, invented styles of revivalism and preaching and communication that were then adopted by Presbyterians and Methodists and Episcopalians; and this has only continued to happen, again and again, since then. Seventh Day Adventists invented Corn Flakes and started Little Debbie snacks. The Christian Science Monitor is in fact still run by the Church of Jesus Christ, Scientist. And so on.
The application of this conception to our present situation should, I hope, be relatively straightforward. In 2016, many members of "weird" Internet political subcultures were suddenly exposed to the light of day for all to see, their tenets and their methods alike imitated and denounced alternately by mainstream political actors. In the prevailing eight years, however, virtually all of the methods, and a decent amount of the content, of these people has simply become mainstream: absolutely, undeniably mainstream, for both Right and Left.
The so-called "alt-right," in reality a random, chaotic spectrum of vaguely right-wing people on the Internet, did in fact innovate a new model of political debate and communication, focused on intense social-media grouping based on disaffirmation, bullying, irony, trolling, swarming attacks on opposed groups, and on political communication via "memeing," mass popular production of imitative iterative images and concepts valued for their aesthetics more than their content. In 2016, this was decently new, and some people, including Hilary Clinton, genuinely believed (probably wrongly) that their tactics had something to do with getting Trump elected. At this point, though, all these methods are completely mainstream, and have been for some time; nor is there anything particularly right-wing about them. Your grandmother shares political memes created using AI by a progressive PAC funded by George Soros; and your grandfather shares political memes created using AI by a conservative PAC funded by the Coke brothers. Each pretends to be (and perhaps genuinely is) shocked by the other's tactics.
I could (but will not) go down the entire list of things that both Left and Right in America today accuse each other of in terms of "radical" and Weird and unAmerican methods and aesthetics and even content and point out that in most cases these things are, and have been for the last eight years, if not for decades before, entirely mainstream--if not always in politics, than certainly in the culture at large.
Because the fundamental secret of the cultural mainstream is simply that it depends essentially on no content whatsoever; that it is infinitely flexible, and infinitely changeable, and so anything can become mainstream. Scientific racism and eugenics was once the very stuff of American mainstream culture; and so it well could be again. Even in my brief lifetime, I have seen very many things that were totally excluded from the cultural mainstream become completely mainstream: beginning with gay marriage and going from there. Nor are there are any real principles, of American democracy or liberty or cultural properties, that can allow us to predict such changes or impose any particular limits on them. If American culture was once opposed to anything tout court, it was certainly Catholicism; and yet many aspects of Catholicism became mainstream in the 20th century. Mormonism, the weirdest religion in human history, was certainly opposed to mainstream American life: and yet, if one looks today at lifestyle brands and HGTV...
This model, and this metaphor, also helps to explain just what it is I mean by the triumph of the mainstream, and why this is, to an extent, made inevitable by our prevailing cultural models, why no subculture has ever lasted or succeeded in the long-run, or ever can, so long as they are content only to feed off of and react to the prevailing mass-media regime.
The truth (the sad truth) that the last ten years of social media-driven politics has driven home is that subcultures in America now are more than ever before driven by, and feeding off of, the mainstream. Youtubers are not rivals to television sportscasters; they are, by and large, trying to do the same thing, emulating their mainstream counterparts, doing what they do and trying to change as they change: and their fondest ambition, by and large, is to become mainstream as they are mainstream. Nor are "indie musicians" rivals to mainstream musicians: they are listening to Taylor Swift like the rest of us, and transparently looking for the next hit. Nor have radical Internet political gurus, or 4chan swarms, or Facebook groups, rivals to the mainstream candidates and the mainstream political pundits: they are, by and large, reacting to them, drawing their energy from them, trying to be like them and influence them and get them to pay attention to them.
When push comes to shove, all of these people and purported movements have either (1) hit it big and become mainstream, or else (2) failed to do so, but still spent their lives trying to be as much like the mainstream as possible, turning as it turns, changing as it changes, while gradually losing out to it. As time has gone on, and the reality of the dominance of mainstream culture has become clearer and clearer, even those subcultures that did not make it to the mainstream have, generally speaking, gotten much more like said mainstream than they were in 2015. Richard Spencer is voting for Joe Biden; the Catholic Leftists are talking about how good Kamala Harris' policy plans are. Even where they have not succeeded, their very failure has made them more completely cravenly dependent on and subservient to the mainstream than they were when there was still hope of them gaining power in their own right.
But ultimately, the thing that truly ensured that that would never happen is precisely the same thing that these people, at the time, took as evidence that it could happen. The host of the Celebrity Apprentice won the American Presidency; which, properly understood, is evidence not that anything is possible in terms of radical politics, but rather of how powerful the cultural mainstream truly is: the sign of its true, final triumph over all its rivals and imitators. In 2016, Internet weirdos and sectarian religious fanatics and radical politics mavens and advocates of alternative lifestyles the world over suddenly dropped what they were doing, and tried to be like Trump: and over the past eight years, he has beaten out all these imitators, again and again, precisely because they are only imitators. Because they are copies, and he is the original; because they are weirdos, and he is mainstream.
Kamala Harris has more recently, and even more radically, demonstrated how thin the facade of radicalism or indeed of sincerity lies over the entirety of the Democratic Left. People were more and more unhappy with Joe Biden, a candidate who did little or nothing for any of the Left's supposed ideological and political base. Many of these people checked out of politics, built their own movements, their own brands, etc, over the past four years.
Yet when a blank-slate mainstream candidate arrived (a candidate with practically no political record, with a background in complete contradiction to the content of modern Leftism and racial politics, the least impactful Vice President in several decades, and a person that virtually all of these people had at some point in the past denounced or been disappointed by) they embraced her with a fervor and desperation that showed that, all along, they had been driven entirely by the positive and negative currents of the cultural mainstream. They had never wanted to be anything but mainstream, never wanted anything but to float along on the meaningless, contentless current of vaguely political vibes flowing forever from Hollywood to Singapore and back again. Biden had not provided those vibes, and so they had no choice but to drift away into all sorts of smaller channels. But when the river came rushing back, bearing nothing at all that they had ever said they wanted...they dove in quite happily, and let the waves carry them away.
The simple reality is that there have never been two candidates more alike than Donald Trump and Kamala Harris--and alike precisely in being as non-political as possible, in operating on style over substance, aesthetics over content, lurid narratives over issues, attacks over proposals, in short, mainstream culture over politics. Biden was outwardly similar to Trump in many ways: but he was, at heart, a (deeply corrupt, incompetent) experienced career politician and operator, and so very different from Trump indeed.
Even where Trump and Kamala have been forced by circumstances or pressure to articulate actual policy positions and goals, they are more similar than any Democratic or Republican candidates of my lifetime: both have put at center stage similar plans to bring down inflation; both have agendas to manage the economy and create jobs with a mix of lassez faire capitalism and state incentives, commands, and tariffs; both favor increased border security and immigration restrictions; both are what was once called "law and order" candidates, emphasizing crime and punishment rhetorically and in policy; both deemphasize foreign policy, but look set to pursue a somewhat more self-interested version of current American Imperial politics; both "stand by" Israel but want there to be a ceasefire in Gaza; both support gay marriage and IVF; both are solidly pro-choice. The quasi-religious fervor on both sides, then, the insistence that their opponent would destroy America and end democracy as we know it, cannot be ultimately explained in terms of the content of their respective politics--it is better explained by their largely, as I suggested above, acting as the embodiments and mascots of two rival lifestyle brands, pandering to differing (complimentary) demographics.
Coke and Pepsi, Wal-Mart and Target, Alabama and Auburn, Fox News and the New York Times, The New York Yankees and the New York Giants, Facebook and Twitter, Jeep and Honda, White Claw and Bud Light: Trump and Kamala.
The Decline of the American Empire
This essay has so far existed on a rather rarified plane of cultural analysis, dealing with things that exist, if at all, only in the Baudrillardian sense of the simulacrum; but the truth, the very real truth, is that everything I have described above has had, and continues to have, very real consequences for the real world. And that, in the last six months, for the very first time in my lifetime, I have begun to see it actually threatening the bases of American global power.
As I have again and again emphasized in this space, reports of the demise of the American Empire are, without exception, extremely premature. While America has gotten weaker, relatively speaking, along some axes, American power has along many other axes actually gotten stronger in the last several decades. The economic power of American-style capitalism, and the cultural power of American-style mass-media regimes, is more unchallenged all throughout the world, and has penetrated farther into the lives and consciousnesses of more people, than at any other time. The one time I went on TikTok (a website I find it impossible to engage with even mometarily), the algorithim mostly showed me videos of ordinary people in third-world countries demonstrating their cooking techniques. The number of individual cell phone connections in Kenya is 118% of the population of that country. And so on.
It is true that as this power has proliferated, we have seen more people and more governments rivaling this power, imitating its methods and even trying to coopt it for their own uses; but this hardly demonstrates its lack of dominance. Russia and China, despite the claims of their sad, soi-disant apologists in the West, are not attempting to offer a contrary model to American power; they are, rather, trying as aggressively as they can to emulate and imitate and (in the original sense) rival America as they can, and so becoming more and more like her in every dimension. The Russian Orthodox Church recently released a political document calling for what amounts to mid-2000s Heritage Foundation suburban middle-class conservatism, in total contradiction to any native Russian tradition of politics whatsoever; and Chinese "communism with Chinese characteristics" gets to be more like American-style 1940s government-driven capitalism with each passing day. All this certainly threatens the economic and military security of Americans, and also potentially the actual control of powerful American political and military and economic figures over the world: but it is for all that not really a challenge to the actual American Empire, which has never been about benefiting American citizens or even about giving more power to individual American politicians.
Nevertheless, for the first time in my lifetime, I have seen a way in which the American Empire can actually fail; and arguably is beginning to, in front of our eyes.
Because the last few years has seen events happening; events that do not merely emerge from, and cannot be totally controlled by, the cultural and political domains of cultural power. The Russian invasion of Ukraine arises from many factors, including very American and modern ones; but it also has to do with Russian ethnic hatreds and Imperial ambitions that go back a very long time indeed. Even more fundamentally, the Israel-Palestine conflict draws its wellsprings from things that America has never, in fact, been able to digest: Judaism, Islam, sacred places, sacred bloodlines, ethnic nationalism, genocide, bitter generational memories of warfare and massacre and displacement, the battle for land and home and family.
This is all, of course, quite relative; the recent escalation of these conflicts in fact owes a great deal to, and in fact was largely caused by, mainstream global Internet- and pandemic-driven trends in mass-media and political ideology. Still, these events are, in the end, realities: people dying, children being murdered, homes destroyed, men in uniform being conscripted en masse and sent marching to their deaths.
And the dark secret to all of the above, to the entire cultural mainstream and indeed the bulk of American cultural power, is that it cannot really process or make sense or deal with actual realities, untranslated into symbolic binaries. And hence that America's practical power and ability to function as an Empire was always dependent on the ability of its leaders and common people alike to not be totally consumed by the cultural mainstream, to maintain some sense of politics as such, of culture as such, of human life and morality as such, as they were before the American Empire.
Mainstream culture could be unleashed like a plague or a virus to destroy and lay waste to human cultures and societies all throughout the world, breaking down every power that could possibly oppose American power, and thus leaving them ripe for incorporation. Indeed, they are not wrong who see that in the end, the great American mass-media regime has been and remains a mere tool and weapon of more fundamental powers and purposes: a weapon of mass destruction.
What has truly shaken me in the last year, though, is seeing, with absolute clarity, that this weapon has now been turned against American Empire itself; not by its enemies, but by itself. As I have watched the horrific massacres in Gaza unfold, as I have watched Modi continue to overtake India, Macron ruin France, Putin unleash death on Ukraine--and above all, as I have seen Americans react to these things and act on them, not just ordinary Americans but above all powerful Americans, businessmen, diplomats, congressmen, up to the President of the United States himself--I have realized, gradually but clearly, that these people are in no sense acting based on any particular relationship with reality. They are not acting on a moral view of the world, or a political ideology, or a calculus of self-interest, or even a brutal desire for personal power: they are, simply, acting according to the symbols and trends of the cultural mainstream.
Over the past year, America's actions on the world stage have not been merely wrongheaded or perverse--they have been simply nonsensical. Nothing, in fact, could be more totally without any reason, positive or negative, than Biden's treatment of the Israel-Hamas war. Nothing could account for Biden's actions in relation to the state of Israel other than a bizarre melange of cultural assumptions, attractions, symbols, likes and dislikes, utterly without any more basic justification. Similar things could be said about many, though not all, treatments of the Ukraine War, or of India and Hindu Nationalism, by the powerful of America.
And this is, in fact, a deadly threat to American Empire as such. America may still control the global economy; she may still have more bombs and tanks and airplanes and ships and better technology than every other power; she may even be about to have unstoppable swarms of killer drones; but for all that, power is ultimately in the reason and will, and if it is not there, it is nowhere else.
An America that merely acts at random, according to random cultural dictates, is not merely an America that cannot be trusted; she is an America whose actions simply cannot be understood, that contradicts itself more than its enemies, and which thus cannot be dealt with at all, with which no treaties can be made, no bonds formed, no politics of any kind carried out. In the reaction of much of the rest of the world to America over the last years, we have seen world leaders, of all stripes, treating her not so much as an unstoppable hegemon as an utterly incalculable force of nature, a chaotic but ultimately irrational "spirit" that can sometimes be harnessed, and must sometimes be opposed, but generally is best avoided. And if this becomes generally true, then regardless of how powerful America may be, America will in fact have no real power in the world--or at least no political power.
There is a pathway of decline for the American Empire whereby, in a world full of peoples who still have, at least, hatreds, if not loves, alliances, if not friendships, goals if not reasons, America itself may be nothing more than a kind of natural resource, a source of power that sometimes aids and more often kills, but which has nothing more to do with the world of men. We may use the whirlwind to generate electricity; but we make no treaties with it.
There may be opportunities in such a world, but it would be, without a doubt, a far more violent world, a world ruled by elder gods, by mass destruction carried out for mere caprice: a world that we have begun to see in the massacres and violence of the past few years.
That world is still only an intermittent presence, a potentiality; but I believe that, in the present moment of American politics, with Donald Trump and Kamala Harris looming on the horizon, that world is more of a possibility, and more of a present reality, than it has ever been before. The vision has been seen; and now must be prevented from coming to pass.
And the only way to prevent such a world, I believe, is to check and oppose the cultural mainstream, and prevent it from permanently capturing American political power.
No comments:
Post a Comment