About half of the U.S. is offended and repulsed by the existence of Donald J. Trump while the remaining half welcome him as a Messiah. Passions and opinions rule here to a farcical degree that I find best represented by the Commedia dell’ Arte. We have our stock characters, including foolish old men and the devious who serve them.
It has not been possible to lay any glove of our Constitutional Republic on former President Donald J. Trump, a savior to millions, a yahoo to millions. Facing 91 criminal indictments, he is presently using the courts to campaign for another presidential term. We are at the stage of our comic drama in which every character speaks the truth and knows the facts–all differently. “All 91 of those charges are baseless, churned up by a Deep State that weaponizes the law against Trump,” a MAGA tells me.
If we didn’t face existentially threatening consequences, we could all sit back and enjoy the performances. But are we so seriously threatened? Or could it be that in our palsied cultural attentiveness threats and joy go up and down like the Dow Jones?
On a different stage are tragic performances, dramatic revisions of what liberty is, boldly deleting J.S. Mills’ admonition regarding how far we pursue our own notion of freedom, that is “so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it.” At some point in our turning our social order into La Commedia the need to constrain and restrain passions and opinions became a feverish pursuit. Treating La Commedia’s jettisoning of free and open inquiry with a “cancel” therapy feeds our conspiracy appetites, especially regarding a nefarious Deep State, and obscures connections here between our opinions and our choices and our sense of personal freedom as a creation of both.
We’ve escaped into opinions that are sanctified as our very own personal choices. This means that in the age of illusions of personal autonomy and choice, our opinions cannot be questioned, especially by those who oppose them. Hoping to make minorities feel better or safer by policing language does nothing to cancel the illusions of personal autonomy grounded in a “free to choose” fiction. The way to detach our loyalty and privileging of our own opinions is to extend our notion of choice to the surround of constraints within which we and our choices must respond. Canceling language and confining it within the boundaries of what is politically correct, especially on our La Commedia stage where the question of which politics are worthy and which are not, is a comic script.
This is stunning, not the Swiftian ferocious Big-Little Endian warfare but this devolution of discourse that has led us here. The feeble hold we now have of achieving a common understanding of what’s real and what is true and what is transparently false befits the dead and dying, not surely any vibrant social, cultural, civil and democratic electoral order. We are a nation suffering the blindness and confusion of the old and dying.
Appropriately, as if we look to the dead to bury the dead, neither of our two aged presidential candidates seem likely to live through a four-year term. And why would the young not be groomed for office, not offered to us as 2024 Presidential candidates, if not because the future promised to the young is feared, for different reasons, by both political parties? The dying see death on the horizon, speak and act as comatose. For Republicans, thoughts of the future, of life after Trump, cannot be thought; for Democrats, the path from identity politics to socialism creates fear that freezes them. A living politics cannot be produced by the dead. It fits La Commedia, however.
What is falling apart is both thought and imagination. The senescent lose memory so that thought has no roots, the sentence begun loses sight of its ending. Attentions are waylaid by a ceaseless hailing on two dimensions, digital and real. Like the aging, we see the country, falling apart, under attack. our imaginations riveted on the angry and divisive. Passions, both elevating and despicable, take center stage.
We face a presidential election in which only one candidate faces loss while the other will not. He will not accept loss and is supported by those who will ensure he will not have to. We have fearful expectations. A January 6th repeat but with greater militant efficiency most likely scattered throughout the western red states? A U.S. military command fully prepared for flash points of insurgency?
Appropriately, as if we look to the
dead to bury the dead, neither
of our two aged presidential
candidates seem likely to live
through a four-year term.
Whether Federal forces trouncing rebels against the Deep State of Federal rule leads to another New Morning in America or even greater anxiety, fear and hate now brewing is an opinion and passion matter. We are far beyond applying a dialectic of reason. Trump is better prepared for victory, telling us that he will move very swiftly to place any silos of opposition under his direct command or put in place elsewhere those who pledge themselves to him, of which there seem to be a growing number. If this were to happen, surely all of the gentrified, meritocratic, socialist-leaning, DE&I, and “Woke” factions would suffer a sickness unto death, while the MAGAs would exult as the minions of Julius Caesar did when he replaced the Roman Republic with himself.
But why would we expect that the collapse of any means to find common understanding and the disorder that collapse engenders would disappear? Why would a country that has lost its way of knowing itself in any prideful hopeful manner suddenly retrieve all that under the rule of an autocrat, one who lives only for himself, and is thus callous about others, society, country and the planet itself? Neither Julius Caesar nor the Roman Republic survived the Dark Woods of Rome itself.
We most likely won’t grow young again in a democratic spirit under an autocratic Trump. Nor will any number of insurrections level out the madness of social media or the power of tech and finance to shape our lives without our consent. We won’t all become gentrifying Woke vegans adapting syntax to 72 genders and requiring Critical Race Theory in every classroom. We’ll still parade viciousness on social media and totter in a pit of confusion as passions fire up and opinions wander further and further down the corridors of conspiracies and the zany mad confusion of La Commedia.
It may be that we’re at the fire on Fort Sumter stage when a State militia fired upon a Federal garrison. Or, from another view, Lincoln orchestrated that to place the onus of starting the war on the South. Southerners were seething with conviction that the presidency and Washington government were trampling on their personal and State sovereignty. The Senate investigation of the January 6th attack was countered with the view that the Feds orchestrated the January 6th insurrection. Perhaps Biden and his liberal, progressive, socialist supporters stand now where Lincoln and the entire Federal government and bureaucracy stood in 186l. April 12th.
But perhaps not, given that the threat of insurgent governmental overthrow rests in one man, Donald J. Trump, a bombastic, corrupt man The “mass party organization, dependent on widespread social violence carried out by organized paramilitary groups,” which describes a fascist threat, is a degree of organization and implementation foreign to a geriatric megalomaniac. (James Butler, “A Circular Motion,” London Review of Books, 8 February 2024) In short, there is no there when it comes to a Trump-triggered revolution. The dangers we face are not in a future that neither party has a plan for, but in a present in the control of the moribund demonstrating an array of rigid inanities.
For instance, we face an “alternative facts” psychosis in the face of knowing that any fact that has an alternative existence can’t be called a fact, at least not on the non-quantum level. We face contesting narratives that at once deflate their authority and credentials by identifying arguments and dialectic discourse itself as “narratives.” No one argues or makes a case. Everyone tells his or her story, narrating their personal take. This madness finds its way out on social media, an exemplum of La Commedia.
Perhaps for some, it is amusing when any case brought forth, no matter how bulletproof, can be dismissed, at your whim, as Deep State “weaponized”? Everyone can, at their own personal discretion, “round up the usual suspects.” Indictments against you are most likely woven conspiratorially, not discovered. Conspiracies, not truths, are exposed. The truth of anything is not mystically hidden but spun within the devious web of the Deep State, a cabal intent on enriching themselves, Woking” Americans (a brainwash?), and destroying “personal freedom.”
On this La Commedia stage, it may be easier to impeach Biden than Trump. Who the patriots are and who the villains are, who to lock up and who to elect cannot be measured. We’ve lost the ruler, or each has its own. Whether it’s Biden who is the Gironte, the old man so old he’s laughable, or it’s Trump, dyed pompadour and orange-tanned face, remains in the eye of the beholder.
Joseph Phillip Natoli’s The New Utrecht Avenue novel trilogy is on sale at Amazon.
Source: CounterPunch