Image by Markus Spiske.
George Packer recently wrote an Atlantic piece that cleverly situated the Trump regime within a familiar Orwellian framework. According to Packer, Lindsey Graham, Mike Johnson and other slavish Trump sycophants have become comically ridiculous (Packer references Henri Bergson’s theory of comedy) in direct proportion to their ability to absurdly and mechanically mimic Trump’s perspective with the same rhetorical mannerisms that they had employed mere months ago to argue the exact opposite point of view. “Without missing a beat” they once spoke skillfully on behalf of Zelenskyy and now (in robotic fashion) they laud Putin. They are stooges of the moment, laughable figures right out of the pages of “1984.”
As Packer sees it, the old order of American NATO alliances had “made the past eight decades uniquely stable and prosperous in modern history.” In his view, the US descent into realms of Orwellian mendacity originates with the antics of Trump and his lapdogs. Packer does not trace the US embrace of dystopian culture to, say, renaming the US military juggernaut the Department of Defense – an example of Orwellian deception far more confusing than playing a game of musical chairs with global alliances.
Packer’s calculus proposes that the danger of Trump stems from his power to humiliate and control his underlings in such a fashion that only he retains the ability to speak his mind, while all of the lesser accoutrements of the MAGA-sphere are reduced to being mechanized puppets.
I worry that many mainstream, liberal pundits have made fascism into a Trump-centric formula – liberals like Packer betray nostalgia for past glories of American democracy and the world order that the US largely controlled after WW II, and dominated almost completely after the Soviet fall. Like most instances of political nostalgia, this view depends on a myopic distortion. The uniquely prosperous and stable eight decades that Packer lauds were eight decades of war, regime change, colonial extraction and – notably – eight decades of gathering extinction, environmental degradation and skewed wealth.
We can either see Trump as a fracture in time, a great misfortune, a lightning bolt from hell intent on destroying a formerly beneficent arrangement of policies and alliances, or we can alternatively see Trump as a representation of American values – a mirror of the culture we created. The schism between liberals and progressives hinges on whether or not one views Trump as an aberration, or a preordained end point of systemic failure.
By the same token we might raise a skeptical eye at Packer’s revisionist assessment of Marco Rubio and his passive discomfort as an extra in the theatrical meeting with Trump, Vance and Zelenskyy:
“He sat mute throughout the Oval Office blowup while his principles almost visibly escaped his body, causing it to sink deeper into the yellow sofa. Having made his name in the Senate as a passionate defender of democracy and adversary of authoritarianism, he must have suffered more than others from the inner contortions demanded by the new party line—they were written on his unhappy face.”
I have far more curiosity about the inner contortions that George Packer employed to rehabilitate Marco Rubio – a stick figure neocon with predictable views on corporately inflicted climate overheating (he doesn’t believe in it), gun control (he doesn’t believe in it), and abortion (he doesn’t believe in it). The one thing that Rubio believes in with undeterred passion is war, and this, in Packer’s view, makes him a “passionate defender of democracy and adversary of authoritarianism.” Apparently, Rubio’s enthusiasm for giving the authoritarian genocidaire, Netanyahu, a blank check for all the bombs of his dreams has no effect on Packer’s assessment.
Rubio’s constricted body language during the Trump/Zelenskyy showdown seemingly provides Packer with the pretext to assume that Republican capitulation to Trump conceals, in at least some instances, an internal moral crises. It may be that Rubio had some sort of confused hiccup, a moment of puzzlement as the story line shifted on a dime, or it may be that Rubio recoiled at his passive role, his mandate to be a mute walk-on in a drama that might have been more persuasive had he been excluded.
Packer gives himself license to fantasize about the allegedly tortured inner life of sycophants, and that troubles me. If we overly humanize Trump’s henchmen and speculatively envision them as ambivalent victims of Trump’s alleged mystical powers, we miss the seriousness of our predicament. US politicians have been morally castrated as a matter of structural design, for, at least the eight decades of my lifetime. Trump can’t be blamed for the vacuous surrender to corporate schemes that US politicians dependably perform. Give Trump credit for exploiting the soulless dregs that he has surrounded himself with, but he did not drain the humanity from Marco Rubio. The moral desert that comprises the center of the former Florida senator resulted from a drought that long preceded Trump.
Packer concludes his piece by asserting that the public view of the Russian/Ukraine conflict has not followed the narrative plot that Republican politicians newly embrace. The public still reviles Putin and two thirds of Americans (according to polls that Packer cites) want to continue to arm Ukraine. In Packers view, America’s public approval for arming Ukraine “might be America’s last best hope.” This misses the larger issue – how did the US become a rapidly consolidating fascist country with politicians (centrist Democrats, neocons, libertarians, MAGA loyalists), all playing their preassigned bit parts?
The true masters of the system, the military industrialists and the corporate profiteers lose nothing if the US shifts alliances. The public support for Ukraine is little more than a lingering reflection of recent media perspectives. The public is always at the mercy of mass media and corporate control of information. In a country that has spent more money on military spending than the nine leading global competitors combined, the US public still fails to react with alarm. Militaristic propaganda is at the heart of public control, and there are not even vestiges of antiwar passion detectable within the congressional body.
The anomie and gloom that characterize the public mood as fascism threatens to attain consolidation and crush all dissent, cannot be remedied by backward steps into the immediate neoliberal system that gave rise to Trump in the first place.
A proposed withdrawal into the recent past of Biden, or even Obama (if it were even possible to do so – it isn’t), condemns the public to accept a retreat into familiar safety – a set of governmental policies that the late David Graeber attributed to “dead zones of the imagination.”
Graeber noted that:
“…revolutionary moments always seem to be followed by an outpouring of social, artistic and intellectual creativity. Normally unequal structures of imaginative identification are disrupted; everyone is experimenting with trying to see the world from unfamiliar points of view; everyone feels not only the right, but usually the immediate practical need to re-create and reimagine everything around them.”
A true resistance to fascism would involve something more powerful than fatuous dreams about an idealized past. After all, superficial fantasies about the virtues of the past are Trump’s shtick. I believe that we have two real choices – capitulation or revolution. The option of stepping meekly into the immediate past, as Packer proposes, will excite almost no one. This is a time – taking inspiration from David Graeber – for re-creation and reimagining.
This piece first appeared on Nobody’s Voice.
