By ann summers

“We can’t be sure how many people really support Trump, Edsall reports, since there’s considerable evidence that they aren’t telling pollsters the truth. Voting for Trump, it appears, is something white people do in the shadows. It’s a forbidden desire that is both liberating and self-destructive, not unlike the married heterosexual who has a same-sex lover on the down-low, or the executive who powers through the day on crystal meth and OxyContin. On some level you know the whole thing can’t end well, but boy does it feel good right now.

I have argued on multiple occasions that white Americans, considered in the aggregate, exhibit signs of an unconscious or semi-conscious death wish. I mean that both in the Freudian sense of a longing for release that is both erotic and self-destructive — the intermingling of Eros and Thanatos — and in a more straightforward sense.” 

Cornel West on the end of neoliberalism still tries to rehabilitate the Bernie-or-Bust (BoB) counterfactual position (“Sanders would have defeated Trump”), without providing a critique of the exceptional American capitalism that now continues as a strategy of tension entertaining the RWNJs with spectacles of the Left in chaos and crisis.

The left needs to plan post-protest, because if we are in a post-truth media age, the public sphere may be irretrievably shattered by the autocratic attraction of celebrity narcissism.

… the exploitation of national crises to push through controversial policies while citizens are too emotionally and physically distracted by disasters or upheavals to mount an effective resistance.

The neoliberal era in the United States ended with a neofascist bang. The political triumph of Donald Trump shattered the establishments in the Democratic and Republican parties – both wedded to the rule of Big Money and to the reign of meretricious politicians.

This lethal fusion of economic insecurity and cultural scapegoating brought neoliberalism to its knees. In short, the abysmal failure of the Democratic party to speak to the arrested mobility and escalating poverty of working people unleashed a hate-filled populism and protectionism that threaten to tear apart the fragile fiber of what is left of US democracy. And since the most explosive fault lines in present-day America are first and foremost racial, then gender, homophobic, ethnic and religious, we gird ourselves for a frightening future.

Wrong, neoliberalism is something that just doesn’t end, if anything it has been resuscitated as a dissonant economic regime, with the irregulated(sic) strategy of tension brought by what passes for Trumpian strategy.

Post-truth media as policy prescription now gives the US a revival of the key elements of neoliberalism as a secondary mode of production now animated by ethno-nationalism. Barbarism got its human face, just in time for Halloween.

The main points of neoliberalism have now been given a pageant treatment and there is miscongeniality(sic) in the now normalized street-level hatred that can only get worse, only to be arbitrated and enabled by a paramilitarized police with pent-up racial animus in the rank and file. Continue reading →