Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

It was necessary to begin thinking that there was no centre, that the centre could not be thought in the form of a present-being, that centre had no natural site, that it was not a fixed locus but a function, a sort of nonlocus in which an infinite number of sign-substitutions came into play. This was the moment when language invaded the universal problematic, the moment when, in the absence of a centre or origin, everything became discourse.

– Jacques Derrida*, 1988*

Addressing “the forces of wickedness and evil,” Stephen Miller at Charlie Kirk’s Memorial Service addressed a second-person plural “You”:

You have nothing. You are nothing. You are wickedness, you are jealousy, you are envy, you are hatred. You are nothing. You can build nothing. You can produce nothing. You can create nothing. We are the ones who build. We are the ones who create. We are the ones who lift up humanity.

In President Trump’s own Memorial address he said “I hate my opponents and don’t want the best for them.”

First, unpackaging the Derrida quote.

In a search for a center, a stable single truth, opposition strains toward domination through hierarchy. This is doomed in the absence of such a center and thus we are left with the play of discourse unable to produce stability but only a battle to cancel, suppress or dominate in an effort to impose a monological order. An Order of One Voice.

The point or implication here is that in the absence of a center that binds opposing views, we are left with “an infinite number of sign-substitutions” that come into play. After Faith as such a centre of origin came Reason and after Reason has come Narratives, infinite number now spawned in Cyberspace.

Now, Stephen Miller’s words.

He reduces narratives that cannot be answered or contained within a point of origin or center to a binary of good and evil and so denies the legitimacy of one. There is no way that ‘wickedness and evil” can function “to lift up humanity.” Although described as insane and cringeworthy, Miller’s words fit appropriately in the evangelically spirited, hagiographic service. He brought a political, seemingly irreconcilable dualism to a level that preempts debate – moral dualism — while enthusing further a politics of passion that threatens any order before Trump.

Lastly, Trump’s words.

He hates his opponents in the Biblical way in which he channels words of Old Testament Jeremiah: “And I will cast you out of My presence,” and New Testament Matthew: “But the sons of the kingdom will be thrown into the outer darkness“. Trump’s summary condemnation fits the moral binary of those who lift up humanity and those of wickedness and evil who produce nothing.

When a political dualism is reduced to a moral/religious binary, the acts of casting out and throwing into darkness must go on without wishing the best for the wicked. Or those on the other side of the aisle. Or those who “weaponized” the institutions of the Federal Government against the Builder, Donald J. Trump.

We shall see at some point whether political dualism is transmuted into a Good & Evil battle with each side aware of what they are. I seriously doubt whether this 236 year old Constitutional republic will regress to Muscular Christianity (Charles Kingsley, 1857) and its politics evangelical revival and a Fourth Great Awakening, But right now our dualism of Democrat and Republican leaves out many either because such views are transgressive in either party’s view, or they exist beyond duopoly awareness.

Opposing camps in our duopoly can be seen in modern times, from Reagan to Trump. A gradual blurring of the armies in the field so that who wants to destroy who and for what reasons is observable on the sign/signifier level. Even those accused of being “Woke” are not sure of what that is. Perhaps Americans are not as enraged by Diversity, Equity and Inclusion as Trump soldiers are but certainly moved to anger by the meme DEI. And though saying Trump is a Mussolini type authoritarian and nationalist or more totalitarian like Stalin and Hitler fits the demands of dualism, it obscures what seems more likely the case. And that is, Trump, like the Kirk shooter, has confounded the dualism and shown us disjunction and difference, a dissemination of meaning unstructured by an oppositional politics already indeterminate ideologically but avid and rancorous performatively. “Where ignorant armies clash by night” (M. Arnold, 1867)

The presence of this fragmentation overspilling dualistic opposition can be seen in Cyberspace in all its outposts both Surface and Dark. According to AI, cybersecurity folks don’t see Inferno circles of Darkness: “The “darkest” content is simply the most extreme and dangerous illegal activity found within that space. There are early signs that the Kirk shooter is somewhere in there but not on the Right of the Left. The kid overspills the borders of our duopoly.

He’s not alone.

On the dualities of political history, Trump doesn’t fit. He’s not a category in a taxonomy but rather he’s a statistical anomaly. Trump is a distraction in a pursuit of what duopoly doesn’t encompass.  But the Kirk shooter isn’t. And he isn’t talking which means those tugging against each other will write the script they can understand.

When I seek a literary illustration here of a mindset we can’t grasp I think of Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener.” I was at first unable to comprehend why Bartleby preferred not to. Four years later, Melville write The Confidence Man where he probed the disheartening underbelly of a capitalist society where distrust and deceit were fertilized. There was no language to either expose deceit or break from dualities of domination/defeat.

A “Re-set” contingent (the Let’s Reboot the whole system) in the U.S., may be either revolutionary or nihilist, both beyond our oppositional politics to platform. But both positions are thoughtful. Turgenev’s character Bazarov in Fathers and Sons, 1862, expounds in a Prove Me Wrong manner a nihilist world view, as do Lenin and Trotsky preach an organized revolution. What we have among the “online radicalized” young are passions as Locke defined them, unreasoned, which are activated in cyberspace arenas.  Motives here are all fuzzy but what is less so is the failure of the duopoly to recognize and respond.

Neither can our political dualism reckon with a growing anti-democratic fervor, a turn away from liberal democracy. In challenging the separation of and balance of three co-equal governmental powers, an independent judiciary, respect for electoral results and the smooth transition of power thereafter, unquestioned loyalty to the due process of law and the verdicts of juries President Trump has already done much to undermine Western style democracy. Even when he departs from the scene, this anti-democratic yearning for autocracy politics will either be continued in a Republican Party or that party along with Democrats will have to find some way to glue the pieces of liberal democracy back together.

But right now, the Republican Party is willing to carry through the destructive politics of unitary executive power and a dismantling of key institutions and agencies of government. Such politics now on the Republican Conservative side would not be recognizable to Chicago School of Economics or the Neoliberal mission of Cheney/Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz/Perle. There are the MAGAs but like the Woke, exactly who are they? The war that Trump, Miller, Hegseth and other collaborators want to bring on face the real problem of putting a Johnny Reb uniform on the “You are nothing” wicked they want to fight and destroy. Equally nebulous are the “We are the ones who lift up humanity” by which Miller means ICE, his gestapo doing the heavy lifting for Trump who’s a humanitarian when he’s not hating.

There is a traditionalist impulse attracting voters to the Republican Party but it would be unrecognizable to Goldwater, Buckley, Buchanan, Russel Kirk who establish their views in the 18th cen. Edmund Burke. That conservatism brought traditional values as they defined them into the present to temper revolutionary impulses. The traditionalist contingent has sought to restore such values of the past, mostly nostalgic, and assert a stable order and repress the urge of individuals for change.

The turning point now is to an Evangelical order that condemns above and beyond debate and cements change to God’s Will, a will that does not seem to ever disrupt Market Rule.

The Trump cult contingent of MAGAs may partially share the Re-set and Renewal of the past as well as the always on hand values of Tax cuts/No regulations/ Anti-union conservatives but whether Trump’s personal drive to autocracy lives after him depends on how deeply that drive achieves a lasting structural integrity, or, as now what seems possible, the whole cloth of duopoly is rewoven as a moral binary supporting a Christian Nationalism. Steven Miller, the Archangel, wielding a spear against Satan, some Radical Left Lunatic only Trump can see.

What seems more plausible from a present perspective is that some monsters will go back into the box of wealth management, venture capital, private equity and such, some monsters will go on FOX or return to Epstein Island, some monsters will rehearse for the part of Trump II, the Republican Party will do some Rehab and then go back to globalizing economics and politics, and the Democratic Party will be a party of Redistribution.

This last? Probably not, but nevertheless my homage to my fellow Brooklyn College alum, Bernie Sanders.

The post The Angry Dualism of U.S. Politics appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

From CounterPunch.org via this RSS feed