NO EXIT

The following is an attempt to synthesize the recent political developments in the USA into some form of narrative.

Among the ruins of liberalism

Beyond any doubt the myth of American Exceptionalism—the belief that the country is morally exemplary and superior to other nations, cornerstone of US identity and foreign policy—has been pulverized by many factors. One disastrous military intervention after another, where the most powerful army in history is always defeated, while the victim countries are razed to wastelands; the hideous reality of institutionalized racism and police brutality; widespread government and corporate surveillance; the abject evil of corporations ranging from the oil sector incinerating the habitable conditions of our world, to arms manufacturing profiting from wars, mass shootings, drug trafficking, to those vile enough to make of healthcare a business; to the fact women are not full citizens in the country for not having control of their bodies hence their destiny; the “free press” exposed as the propaganda of the US war machine—all this has shattered the myth of American Exceptionalism in the eyes of the US public and the wider world. Its collapse has reduced the ideology of liberalism globally to ruins.

Joe Biden was the carnal embodiment of a zombie liberalism that dreamed of unattainable US hegemony, while still preaching to fight for liberal values such as democracy, diversity, equality, freedom of expression. The ruins of liberalism are these ideals contrasted with the reality of Gaza’s live-streamed genocide and the brutal suppression of protests pleading for an end to the massacres. Liberal institutions such as Ivy League universities and Western media played and continue to play a decisive role in the repression of civil society.

This has happened before, but the key difference in the twenty-first century is that the barbarity is naked before the eyes of the world on the screens of mobile devices. Manufacturing consent is not so simple anymore. The reckonings of Black Lives Matter, Palestine, Me too, Climate Justice have unleashed an institutional crisis that has shaken the very foundations of Western civilization. American Exceptionalism was buried for good with the relentless, merciless and perpetuating Nakba. As Chris Hedges writes, the political and corporate class of the USA may not understand this, but the rest of the globe certainly does.

Every major international institution continues to state that Joe Biden’s legacy is a heap of crimes against humanity. And so liberalism around the world falls with him. His subordinates, the likes of Starmer, Macron, Von der Leyen are left reeling with the new developments of US foreign policy. They are orphaned. If they feel there is no ground beneath their feet, it is because this is precisely the case: dependent on the USA for values and purpose, incapable of finding it for themselves, of listening to the mass movements of their own populations asking for basic human rights such as affordable housing, healthcare, education, a habitable planet—they are now in free-fall. The European leaders cling to the only policy they are capable of imagining, which is a senseless, all-out rearmament. It is laughable to call these liberal or centrist parties, when they are in fact drifting towards their own versions of totalitarianism.

For now that the Bidens and Clintons and Obamas have been relegated to oblivion, the USA has discarded the mask of American Exceptionalism and reveals a disturbing new face. What has happened since January cannot be understated. It not only amounts to a new nationalism and ideology. The developments signify a fundamental transformation in the very nature of power.

A new world is coming into being.

The new nationalism

There are two layers to the new regime. The first is the most visible: the consolidation of a dictatorship and an extremist Christian nationalist state. In the last few months the US government has undergone a hollowing and a purge. The old federal bureaucracy, what conspiracy theorists called the Deep State, has been substituted for loyalists to Donald Trump. At this point in time a third Trump term is less likely because of the man’s health than because of democratic institutions.

Often liberal intellectuals shelter in a sense of superiority over Trump’s theatrics and stupidity. The man is undoubtedly an idiot of legendary proportions, but he is also a political juggernaut. Eighty criminal charges including being found liable for sexual assault have not so much as wrinkled his public image in the eyes of his supporters. In fact the opposite happened. He derives power both from his astonishing talent in commanding spectacle–a mythical circus master–and from the weakness of his opponents. The worst thing we could do is not take Donald Trump, the most defining figure in recent US politics, seriously–or rather the amalgamation of corporate interests that have chosen him as their mascot.

So what is Trump’s plan? We won’t understand it through the myopia of corporate media. They write their reports from an icloud miles above Earth. To them neoliberalism is something akin to a temple and a science, with invisible market forces operating with a kind of divine grace.

Economics is not science: it is ideology, and we must strive to understand the brutal thinking behind Trump’s policy decisions. By the hand of economist and formidable political analyst Yanis Varoufakis, we must gaze into the abyss of Trump’s brain and risk that it gazes back at us. I highly recommend reading his full analysis here, as well as here. I’ve personally found Varoufakis an essential analyst, writer, and leader (both political and moral) for our time.

In short Trump’s policy is to perpetuate US economic hegemony by reducing the trade deficit and increasing domestic manufacturing. He strives to do achieve this by depreciating the dollar in order to make US exports more competitive and imports more expensive. So far the plan is running like clockwork. His tariffs have shocked foreign banks into lowering their interest rates, appreciating their currency, and bringing down the value of the dollar. Trump expects this cheaper dollar to remain hegemonic.

The industrial revivalism is the reason Republicans have not made good on their promise to begin deportations on the scale of millions. Deportations have not significantly spiked from Biden’s term (they haven’t even matched Biden’s numbers). What has changed in this regard is the gloating, the televised cruelty of the deportations, a state terror campaign aimed at vulnerable groups and opponents of the government that is designed to whip up the MAGA base.

The truth is Trump’s plan requires immigrant and undocumented labor to succeed. Deportations will be mainly reserved for opponents of the government, as shown in the disturbing case of Mahmoud Khalil, where Republicans exhibit a willingness to exile legal residents, perhaps even citizens for their political views. Freedom of speech, once such a dire concern for the right, is nonexistent under these circumstances. Intellectual life in the USA, as happens anywhere under authoritarian rule, shall no doubt wither as a result.

Brutal as Trump’s economic shock is to world trade (though as Varoufakis explains, less brutal than the neoliberal Nixon shock or the 2008 financial crash), it amounts to no more than sound and fury in our day and age. Our world is dying. Only a third of tropical forests are intact, the rest either degraded or destroyed. Carbon dioxide has exceeded the 350 parts per million that climate scientists screamed and warned was the maximum level for sustaining life and civilization as we know it. The forecast is that by May CO2 levels will reach their highest concentration in over two million years. Not only do Washington elites seek to perpetuate their economic power into the midst of a wasteland: the administration’s policies accelerate the decline of critical life-sustaining ecosystems. Shall we call them eschatological economics?

US foreign policy has undergone a tectonic shift. The USA is interested in hegemony only as expressed in the US dollar and Silicon Valley tech companies, not the pretenses of American Exceptionalism. A characteristic of fascism is to compensate a perceived loss of national dignity through territorial expansion, what the Germans called Lebensraum, and the new regime dreams of expanding its borders to an extent not seen since the country’s inception. Instead of the fabled east to west settler-colonialism of its origins, the core of the Frontier Myth so essential to the US national narrative, now the expansion goes from south to north, chasing the oil and minerals of a melting Arctic. I didn’t believe it at first, but the empire is quite serious in acquiring the whole of North America. On top of this they’ve talked about reclaiming the Panama Canal and annexing Gaza. I will discuss the latter in the last section.

Most national narratives are rooted in the past. Mexican nationalism for instance is based on the idea of a pre-Hispanic identity that was then mixed with European culture, what we call mestizaje. US nationalism, the first nationalism that engendered the modern world, came as an act of will from its founders. As such it was rooted not in the past but in the future, in the notion of progress that was the very yearning of the American Dream.

US nationalism was based on the idea that the course of history pointed towards a greater age. History was linear, an arrow pointing to a better horizon. This is similar to Christianity, where each day lived is a day closer to the Kingdom of God.

The crisis came at the point where the promise did not deliver. Instead of betterment scientists revealed that the obscene profits corporations had relentlessly pursued led to ecological catastrophe. Suddenly the line of the horizon revealed not an impending Heaven but an approaching Hell. The societal despair that came from this epiphany is in great measure what led to the consolidation of the current regime.

The very conception of time has changed, and it has drained all meaning out of the capitalist way of life. For what is the point of neoliberalism’s state of all-out competition, if it leads not to a betterment in living standards but a deterioration?

The Trump regime aims to mend this crisis of faith in capitalism. The new nationalism—disaster nationalism as Richard Seymour calls it in his essential new book which I cannot recommend enough—is fundamentally a hallucinatory politics. Instead of tackling the present and material existential crises, it shields the avarice of private enterprise by hallucinating fictional problems like wokeness, Muslims, Mexicans, Antifa, the replacement of Whites by Jews. These “problems” let us remark are far safer than the very real crises of our time. In the face of mass extinction, the new nationalism offers magical thinking. It is a political messianism that seeks to redeem capitalism in the public eye. One must merely eradicate DEI, lock-up troublesome environmentalists, purge wokeness, commit to the wonders of the free market, and all will be well. It is grounded in the old Orwellian maxim: IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

The notion of progress has become a parody of itself, utterly lost in an “arms-race” for Large Language Models and the magical deliverance of Artificial General Intelligence. Capitalism through AGI is miraculously supposed to solve every problem it has produced. AGI is another form of contemporary messianism.

Other cornerstones of progress such as public health and life expectancy have become sacrificial lambs to the altars of necrotic hypercapitalism. RFK is supposedly against Big Pharma, yet his anti-science policies ensure the proliferation of disease in his country. They make the population as vulnerable as possible, thereby maximizing profits for private healthcare. Evil does not even begin to describe the kind of avarice behind this blitzkrieg of privatization.

The new regime strives to consolidate a white, Christian nationalist state. This is a source of oppression domestically, as they focus on purging “the enemy within,” basically anyone who reads history and acknowledges the horrors of capitalism, imperialism, racism, patriarchy, and colonialism.

But the greatest hideousness of the new policies rears its face in Palestine. For these religious fundamentalists the consolidation of Israel from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean is essential to the Second Coming of Christ. To summarize, US nationalism still looks to the future, but the notion of progress is supplanted by prophecy.

Schopenhauer described the world as will and representation. Everything has a will that strives to preserve itself. Nietzsche refined this philosophy into the will to power, power being the imposition of one’s will upon others.

And this is what Washington has always failed to understand: cruelty does not amount to strength. To impose one’s will upon others one needs moral authority, or at least the illusion of it. That was the whole point behind American Exceptionalism. We have witnessed the fall of liberal civilization and the erosion of the US global empire as we know it. The famed city on the hill is now becoming something akin to a feudal fortress, a walled castle enjoying either vassalage abroad or opposition in the form of BRICS.

Capitalism has become cannibalistic: it is eating itself alive. I suspect the new leadership will compensate their weakness with ever more astonishing displays of cruelty. The glorification of violence is another of fascism’s traits. Violence shall be—has already become—not only a spectacle and another form of entertainment, but an anesthesia to societal despair.

For when the trade deficit shrinks, so will Wall Street’s funds. This is when the nightmare truly begins. Trump touts himself as a man fighting for the working class, which is of course laughable. He will introduce monstrous tax cuts for the rich. And he will blame the subsequent economic misery on whatever vulnerable group is in vogue to scapegoat.

Fusion power

But the first layer of the regime merely serves as the face and the club. The second is far more disturbing and embodies the transformation of the very nature of power in the twenty-first century.

This is what Shoshana Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism and Yanis Varoufakis technofeudalism. It is power as expressed in Big Tech. In this frame human beings amount to data. This data is extracted via an extensive surveillance infrastructure of consumerist technology, everything from phones to computers to televisions (maybe toothbrushes are next) that relentlessly record and process our private lives. The data is analyzed and transformed into the equivalent of twenty-first century gold: behavioral futures or cloud capital, patterns that best predict individual behavior in such a way as that behavior can be modified, coaxed, nudged to a desired outcome. Behavioral futures are sold to the highest bidder, or wielded by the Broligarchy for their own political aims.

The 2024 US election serves to showcase the astonishing dimension of this newfound power, where human will can be modified at the level of choice. When the Broligarchy decided that Donald Trump could best serve their interests, the election outcome was all but decided. In the words of Pay-Pal founder Peter Thiel, the phenomenon of Donald Trump and his nativism as expressed in the ideology of Steve Bannon was a perfect “avatar” for the consolidation of Big Tech’s power.

Now even Bannon is publicly frightened by the new developments. I suspect his role as an advisor will become ever less relevant, one more far-right influencer cheering a third Trump term from the sidelines. His project in many ways has been kidnapped.

Our hope before the election was that governments around the world would regulate Big Tech. The EU was leading in this regard with the Digital Services Act, and I suspect a good deal of Trump’s disdain for Europe comes from these efforts at regulating his master’s corporations. Contrast his treatment of Europe with Keir Starmer’s UK who has been more than compliant with Big Tech, for example giving a former Amazon executive the chair of the Competition and Markets Authority.

Far from regulating Big Tech, we now witness what Zuboff calls fusion power: how these corporations merge with public US infrastructure in an attempt to create one giant all-seeing eye, staring at us from our screens. Now not only is Big Tech unregulated: it seeks to become the state as much as possible. The real goal of DOGE is to clinically slaughter its way to the most sensitive and private data available. In its recent partnership with Visa, X is fast becoming the Everything App (curiously for all their ideological hatred of China this is quite similar and in fact inspired by WeChat).

Peter Thiel is the man who best symbolizes this astonishing fusion power, in particular the merger between Big Tech and the US military. Now a National Security Advisor, his companies like Palantir and Anduril have paved the way for tech in this regard.

Those who possessed the means of production are now entirely dependent on Big Tech for their livelihood and survival. They are grouped, like the proletariat, into a new kind of individual specific to the twenty-first century: the user. The user depends on platforms to do business, for social interaction, communication, consumerism, etc., and as they interact with the technology, they are drained of their data. The user is fundamentally a natural resource.

We often hear how if a product is free, then we ourselves are the product. It’s not entirely true for surveillance capitalism, where human nature and behavior has become simply one more resource in the practice of capitalistic extractivism. Just like for corporations forests amount to mere sources of wood, and the seas of oil and seafood, and mountains of precious minerals, and animals of meat—then human beings are only data and patterns of consumption. Capitalism now packages the very core of our humanity into a commodity for the welfare of corporations.

Terms like “oligarchy” or “conflict of interest” or “monopoly” fail to explain the magnitude of what has occurred. I often hear for instance how the USA is becoming ever more like autocracies such as Russia or Hungary. Putin can only dream of attaining this kind of power. All of us are reduced to mere users of corporations such as X, Amazon, Meta, and Alphabet. Think for a moment how much of your day depends on this type of power, not just social media but email, search engines, applications, operating systems. Think how ubiquitous it has become. Anything that is marketed as being “smart” is in fact a surveillance device.

I want to stress that I don’t believe this amounts to a behavioral determinism, some kind of absolutism that effectively controls all of human choice and action. This would be to fall into the conspiracy theory trap of yearning for totalitarianism, for a system of order, however perverse, in a chaotic and burning world. The situation is far more complex, because DOGE’s efforts as well as decades of neoliberalism have severely weakened the US state. Tech’s surveillance power is the dream of any authoritarian regime, but it curiously rises at the same time we witness the decadence of the state during late-stage capitalism.

Katechon

There is only one other country in the world that has access to this kind of surveillance infrastructure: China. And that is why the USA reorients its cannons from Russia and aims them towards China. The US has no means of competing with China’s industrial powerhouse. Its only answer is a military confrontation.

This is China’s greatest test. China’s modern history has been building to this one moment. It now faces the most powerful military ever assembled. Of course a US-China confrontation signifies Armageddon for our species. Averting this war is the greatest challenge of our time—the greatest challenge for the human experiment. Washington’s new masters view China as the ultimate enemy and the greatest evil. To the likes of Peter Thiel, China is the totalitarian state that is a menace to individual freedom as he defines it, which is a shallow freedom expressed in amassing infinite wealth. For a man who has named his military companies Palantir and Anduril— names taken from The Lord of the Rings, itself a fantasy novel that exults the “men of the West” against the “shadow rising in the East”—China symbolizes communist barbarism. It is the Anti-Christ, while Donald Trump, a man who is the seven deadly sins in carnal form, is somehow the one who will bring the West to deliverance, the tool of God.

That is why during the first congressional address of Trump 2.0, the USA declared plans to build the Golden Dome missile defense system to shield itself from potential strikes on home soil. The inspiration for this is of course Israel’s Iron Dome. This kind of technology is marketed as infallible, but we have seen this is not the case. Routinely the Houthis and Hezbollah evade the Iron Dome defenses, because modern warfare has changed dramatically. Expensive weapons systems are overwhelmed by the use of cheap drone swarms. Waging war has become extremely cheap: this is what the Houthis, emerging from a country victim to one of the worst humanitarian crisis in recent memory, have demonstrated with their blockade of the Red Sea.

Washington fears Armageddon, yes, but it also commends itself to Christ. Right now the only thing standing in the way of a full blown US military confrontation with China is Peter Thiel’s strange concept of the biblical katechon, which has mutated into something of a political philosophy. If I understand it correctly, it means a kind of historical delay of the End of Times, which in our world translates to a restraint in unleashing truly apocalyptic power.

There are many things wrong with the current regime in China, just like there are in the West. But there simply is no reason to risk nuclear winter. Why can’t the USA and China jointly confront the very real, multiple cataclysms of our time? Why can’t they be partners and prosper together, get rich together? Why is a confrontation constantly touted and marketed by corporate media as inevitable? Recently The New York Times was outraged that Elon Musk, who has business ties to China, might have seen the Pentagon’s war plans against Beijing–instead of being outraged by the very existence of those plans!

Those plans may amount to a First Strike, an overwhelming use of force in a surprise attack designed to destroy another nuclear power’s response capabilities. Not only is this delusional and dangerous far beyond rational consideration–this is all optional. Why can’t we all just go on with our lives and enjoy the world? Why am I even writing about these things and not more sonnets about bird-watching?

This is the great question our age poses to Yorick’s corporate skull: why are the ruling classes of the Earth chasing mass extinction? Why are they rushing to their own demise, and that of us all and of everything we have ever known? Why do they insist on building bunkers for themselves instead of halting the destruction? Why this drive towards death, be it in the form of nuclear confrontation, climate cataclysm, biodiversity loss, environmental degradation?

Why?

The answer is not an enigma, some ineffable aspect of human nature, or the mysterious will of the goddess of history. It is in fact pathetic.

THIS IS NOT AN EXIT

I’ve come to understand neoliberalism not only as an economic policy but as a project for the formation of human beings. In the neoliberal model human beings are fundamentally competitors against one another, acting in a stage of universal competition that might as well be defined as a natural physical law. As Richard Seymour writes in Disaster Nationalism, the defining factor in this ethos is advantage. Neoliberalism is a deeply paranoid frame of mind that naturally distrusts society because everyone has an agenda, everyone acts out of narrow self-interest, and there can be no solidarity, compassion, trust, or care beyond the family, which is the single unit of survival.

What exactly is the point of all this competition? Nobody knows. Competition in this sense becomes a state, a condition, a kind of habitat, but not an edifying project with any goal in mind, save perhaps for avarice and the dwindling pleasures of consumerism. The purposelessness of this way of life, where self-worth is attained by measuring success against the failures of others, defines the contemporary corporate character. Neoliberalism may be on its way out, but it is the system that birthed the likes of Zuckerberg, Musk, Bezos.

This system does not so much divide the world between winners and losers: it only produces losers. “Winning” in this system is like chasing the sun. Take a look at those at the summit of the competition. Do they truly seem happy, leading meaningful and fulfilling lives?

The infamous AI-generated Trump Gaza video makes you weep not just because of the obvious immorality of turning the most hideous crime of our century into a resort town—it showcases the colonial, corporate way of thinking that has shaped our world. It is the plastification of the human soul. Jonathan Glazer’s defining film The Zone of Interest shows the Nazis discussing the plans for the final solution as businessmen holding a board meeting. Within the indoctrination of the neoliberal project, a human being only knows how to behave in this manner, only knows how to approach life in this way. It is the death of the imagination, hence that of the capacity for empathy and compassion.

This is why they are so adamant about AI. They need ChatGPT as a crutch to help them think and feel. Even if the technology can’t do that, even if it is faulty, limited–the point is they yearn for it.

The novel that I think best captures the psychopathy of this way of life is Bret Easton Ellis’ extraordinary satire American Psycho. The most horrifying aspects of his novel are not the grotesque murders whether real or imagined perpetrated by the protagonist, investment banker Patrick Bateman—but the social alienation that is eating him alive. It renders Bateman one of the loneliest, most miserable figures you can read about.

At the end of American Psycho, Bateman is at the club where he usually hangs out with his corporate friends, which is a kind of theater of the absurd. Someone calls a cab, and as he gets up to leave, Bateman comes to a doorway covered by red velvet drapes, above which reads the sign: THIS IS NOT AN EXIT.

Those are the final words of the novel. I imagine if Bateman parted the drapes he would have come before a brick wall. It’s an image that encapsulates the human soul entombed within this perverse value system. This way of life has hit rock-bottom. We are witnessing Patrick Bateman’s delirious stream of consciousness externalized and playing in the media all around us–the historical record of his immurement.