From Facebook, a few days ago. The science fiction writer Robert Charles Wilson attempts to summarize the current condition in a single sentence.
Facebook, Robert Charles Wilson, 11 Jan 2025: via David Gerrold.
The concentration of wealth is driving novel communication technologies that are creating a tsunami of misinformation that enables the emergence of far-right political entities that further protect and capture wealth by gutting democratic governance and suppressing knowledge about climate and environmental emergencies through the devaluation of education and science at a time when artificial intelligence begins to transform the nature of war and competition for resources risks armed conflict between nuclear-armed nations no longer constrained by a liberal ideology of cooperation and human rights.
Inequality and oligarchs, check. Misinformation, check. Suppressing knowledge about climate change, check. AI, check. …
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NY Times, Opinion by Jamelle Bouie, 15 Jan 2025: You’ll Never Guess Who Trump’s New Favorite President Is
When was America great? What does MAGA want to go back to? Trump never says exactly.
And yet Trump does have a sense of when America was great. You can see it in the substance of his second-term agenda. What does he want to do with another four years? Trump seems to imagine an American autarky: a closed nation, self-sufficient and indifferent to the rest of the world.
And
Imposing tariffs, expanding territory, a new Mexican war and a traditional vision of the American people — these are what the nation needs, Trump says, to be “great again.” In which case, MAGA cannot possibly refer to anything in the 20th century, when the United States essentially built the modern international order, as much as it must refer to some time in the 19th century, when the United States was a more closed and insular society: a second-rate nation whose economy was far smaller and less prosperous than our own.
And so Trump is obsessed now with President William McKinley, who occupied the White House from 1897 until his assassination in 1901. The Guilded Age, when the rich got richer.
Indeed, as a billionaire himself, Trump has every reason to look back to the late 19th century as a golden age, a time when wealth was an even more direct path to political power than it is now. A time when the American political system sputtered and struggled under the weight of endemic corruption. When with enough cash on hand, a railroad magnate or a steel baron could buy a set of politicians for himself, to do with as he pleased. It was a time when public power was too weak and limited in scope to stand as an effective counterweight to private fortunes, and where the laboring classes were under the heel of powerful corporations, whose allies in government were often ready and willing to use force to stifle discontent.
(As my discussion of Lakoff suggested: reduce the power of the government so the wealthy become more wealthy.)
And so:
If what Trump idolizes is some part of the 19th century, then to “make America great again” is to make the United States a poorer, more isolated place, whose economy and government is little more than an engine of upward redistribution for a handful of the wealthiest people on the planet.
In fairness to the incoming president, there is no reason to think that he has any of these precedents in his head. What he has, instead, is a deeply rooted sense that the world is a fundamentally zero-sum place and that American greatness means that others must be diminished. His zero-sum, social Darwinistic intuitions are echoes of an earlier age of reactionary aggression and shameless avarice. There is no such thing for Trump as a positive exchange or a mutually beneficial relationship. There is only winning and losing, the dominant and the dominated.
I’ve said this before too: conservatives view life as a zero-sum game, while the arc of history has been advancement for all via non-zero-sum games. Trump is the epitome of tribal mentality. And apparently many many people are sympathetic to his worldview.
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Busy day today, will amend this post, and post more, tomorrow.
