tangential observation: meeting a police or National Guard presence with hate, contempt, categorical group stereotyping, and hostility is counterproductive and foolhardy. The goal is for the police and military to be on the side of the legacy of American civil liberties, which means finding ways to communicate with the individuals under the uniform without a lot of ideological noise in the way. The problems the police have been ordered to grapple with are not of their creation. Preemptively assuming that the personal loyalties of all of them must be with the forces of repression amounts to ceding a massive amount of power to the opposition.
Use the spirit of good will. You think police like being ordered out on a hot summer day to police a demonstration? Make it as easy for them--and yourselves--as possible. Don't throw bottles of water at them; put them on the front line in an ice cooler, for both sides. It might not work, at least not at first. They might be ordered to keep their game face on. Try to be friendly anyway. Talk to them without haranguing them, like actual fellow human beings. It's worth a try. At least make it clear that you aren't protesting the police forces. They did not make the rules. And really--how far is cop-baiting by a preening Children's Crusade of social justice protesters going to get, as a tactic? Getting a cop to smile or laugh is a more worthy challenge. Cop-baiting and violence is what people like Stephen Miller expect, and want. The accelerationists of the far Right are looking for that excuse. Putting the police at ease would upset that entire game.
I'm far from persuaded that the US is in the grip of incipient fascism*; it's strange to me to hear narratives from liberals that implicitly imbue the most radical and authoritarian factions of the far Right with more power and influence than they presently possess.That said, vigilance is warranted. And in the event that those forces do begin running the show by taking a radical step like attempting to suspend the Constitution and civil liberties protections to impose martial law, we are going to need police and soldiers on our side, to say No. As many as possible. The most effective way of defeating the forces of political repression is a revolt of the guards. Writing them all off in advance as Nazis or white supremacists is, shall we say, unhelpful to that project. And also ludicrous, given how many nonwhites are police or military nowadays.
[*I don't think ICE raids are per se evidence of impending fascism, either. Border security is essential to the nation-state game. Anyone who enters a country illegally knows that they don't get to make the rules to suit their personal preference. The US expelled 600,000 undocumented Mexicans in 1958. There's always an element of unfairness--and plain chance--in the matter of enforcement. But it isn't some unprecedented indication that we now live in the Fourth Reich. And yes, the Republicans refused to compromise on immigration reform with the Democrats in 2022, because Trump preferred it that way. But that problem is not to be resolved by picking fights with ICE agents. ]
I'm always up for being proved wrong, of course. Always have been.
The Internet is a peerless venue for debate--written debate having an additional advantage of being much easier to review in detail and in context--and it puzzles me why the Internet is so seldom used for that purpose. Blocking, muting, declining to hit some heart emoji and leaving in a huff is a fake substitute for actually airing things out. As is doxxing, canceling, and assassination.
I concur with much, but not all, of what you assert, DC Reade. Trump's flooding of liberal and Democratic urban zones with what is tantamount to a private army is an indispensable stalking horse, or even Trojan Horse, to introduce and acclimate the American populace to the presence of military troops in advance of his declaring martial law under putative cover of the hundred fifty-year old Insurrection Act.
As an nonviolent, civilly-disobedient activist in favor of Civil Rights and in opposition to America's War Against Southeast Asian Peasants movements, as well as a fervent attendee at Woodstock in 1969, I can personally attest -- through direct, lived experience -- to the power of both individual and collective love, or agape, in galvanizing the 'anti-Establishment' political, social and cultural, indeed quasi-revolutionary, tenor of that era. Love animates and sustains nonviolence, and nonviolence is the only viable strategy for toppling Trump and MAGA.
What appears necessary and viable is a massive and sustained movement of strategic nonviolent action -- everything, everywhere, all at once, likely culminating in a general strike and/or mutiny within the military -- that withdraws a sufficient quotient of popular consent to effectively disable the pillars of political, economic and yes, military, support upon which the psycho-fascist Trump regime rests.
This approach is neatly and cogently explicated in this multiple award-winning, 2011 documentary film about the work of the late Gene Sharp, the world’s foremost expert on strategic nonviolent action and three-times Noble Peace Prize nominee, as a superior substitute for violence and war, interweaved with multiple, recent historical examples of nonviolence’s successes around the globe. Everyone should watch this exigent, inspirational film -- in which the power of love fuses with and is expressed by -- nonviolent action and share it with others:
I'm wary of making this into anything more than a publicity stunt.
At most, the National Guard deployments are bait. If no one takes the bait, it's just one big fizzle. A non-story, after the first couple of photo ops. 500 troops in Chicago, deployed for the purpose of protecting Federal buildings that presently face no threat at all. That's the extent of the mission. If all goes well, they'll be bored out of their minds by next week.
Over 2000 Guard troops are in DC right now. They've been there a month or so. The place has a lot of Federal buildings. That's where they're "patrolling."
Agreed, it’s mostly theatrics and spectacle for the MAGA trough. You are absolutely correct to identify the critical importance that protesters and residents adopt a disciplined nonviolent response, which could include ‘turning one’s back’ and kindred methods of resistance that display indifference, mockery and superior equanimity and “love”.
I agree. I'm fine with doing advance work on tactics like mass street protests, up to and including a general strike. And all of the resistance tactics available under conditions where "heaven is high, and the emperor is far, far away." There are more responsible forms of "leaderless resistance" than isolated loners acting out their alienation with violence. Most of us have friends and co-workers. We should talk to them.
I'd also like to hear some ideas on exactly what official decrees would constitute a red line. The official political opposition to Trump has had a problem with jumping the gun literally since the day after the election, and that undercut their case badly. It's obvious that Trump just jawbones to get a rise out of his adversaries, and all too often they have a way of running with his loose talk in ways that inflate the public image of his power. False alarms and wolf-crying are just as much of a mistake as folk wisdom makes them out to be. But there is such a thing as the wolf finally showing up, so to speak. And it would be helpful to discuss what exactly would constitute unprecedented moves that are plainly unacceptable threats to Constitutional liberty.
The Trump administration is a unique case, because Trump administration is what might be termed an "undifferentiated autocracy." It's all about him as Chief Executive Officer of US, inc. He isn't a lean and hungry powermonger bent on galactic domination, like some of his courtiers. He's a whimsical decisionmaker who enjoys playing with power in the spotlight, but he's capable of taking a loss with a shrug, instead of instantly going into overdrive. He isn't the stable genius that he's ordained himself to be, but he has at least some equanimity in the face of setbacks and thwarted plans. I think that's because his priorities elevate his personal wealth accumulation over carrying out an ideological agenda. His economic policies are chicanery.
In particular, Trump's cryptocurrency bro faction appears eager to carry out an agenda with strong hints of building a turnkey operation for crony corruption. A picture that's likely to become more clear over time. I've been reading this guy https://cryptadamus.substack.com/ I'm strictly a layperson on these matters, and I'm glad someone knowledgeable is paying attention to the potential problems there. Cryptocurrency is a shady business. I find no evidence that the Trump administration has any interest in making it less shady.
The opening of this is very funny. I was just theorising about this topic with a friend of mine… Like what does it mean that everyone just needs to constantly talk about how awful everything is? And is that what they really believe?
I sort of suspect it’s not what they really believe… It’s just the thing they all think that they have to say all the time.
Anyway, I’m getting off the larger topic here. I just thought that was a funny evocation of this current phenomena.
It’s a tangential thought, but I’ve long believed that an essential part of American exceptionalism is that the country has never experienced war. Yes. Of course there is Grant/Sherman and the South - that was the real thing. And it still lingers generations later. But that’s it. The civil war of the 1770/80s (which is what it was, in large part) is too long ago and too successfully rewritten after the fact to count. War isn’t war until it happens in your backyard.
For Americans, war is something abstract that happens over there, even when American soldiers are fighting. If that isn’t the true, genuine, irreplaceable exorbitant privilege, then nothing is. No disrespect intended to reserve currencies.
The same thing applies to fascism/totalitarianism or even authoritarianism. Inevitably, the US has swung in that direction at times (e.g., the fights of the progressive era and the censorship of the anti-war camp in 1917, however forgotten today). But we’ve always dodged the more extreme outcomes. Geopolitical luck? National character? Who knows.
Either way, there’s a national ignorance of these things that is pretty unusual in world history. Nothing makes sense without that context. This naïveté is the country’s real superpower, for good and bad.
>>>”Wait, you’re saying, is this guy seriously proposing to talk about the place of love in politics? Isn’t this the same guy, you might further ask, who just wrote a book about doing mushrooms? At which point you might assure yourself that there’s no reason to read any further. You thought I was pushing some over-the-counter centrist Substackian bullshit about how a bird needs both its right and left wings in order to fly or whatever, but it turns out I’m still operating in psychedelic-guru mode, as some self-styled prophet of the new Age of Aquarius? You’re ready to go back to gawking at Nate Silver’s pie-charts?”
The above quoted passage is a highly amusing “Rick and Morty” type of monologue, but dare I suggest that, after the laughter has died down, this relapse into self-deprecating humour was an unfortunate form of personal defensiveness that simultaneously prevented you from seeing the Truth that you nonetheless actually gave an (inadequate) expression to . But possibly lacked the courage to face the full force of the Negative.
By “love” you clearly mean Christian Agape. So what was the blockage that prevented you from saying so? You were talking about “politics” and not..., er, something else… and so felt embarrassed to be speaking about something which in 2025 is apolitical or anti-political and is merely "religious" in the most debased bourgeois life-style choice sense of the word.
The Early Christian communities were pacifist, anti-imperialist and communist.
But that was during one of the most important Axial Ages.
Today our condition is the violent, mass-murderous anti-thesis of an Axial Age. The 2010s-2020s have been a period of terminally morbid Nihilism.
Therefore, as you yourself have perceived but lacked the fortitude to fully confront, “love” is indeed a pitiable, pathetic attempt at formulating an antidote to the Dark Ages we are within and into which we will only descend further de profundis.
On Axial Ages, I recommend from both a scholarly point of view as well as a point of historical comparison that provides commentary upon the present day, “Seshat History of the Axial Age”
"Seshat's data muddied Jaspers’ empirical claims about the uniqueness of the first millennium BCE to the point that they became untenable. The solution to that problem, I believe, is to make axiality part of a 300,000-year evolutionary story about human values. Inevitably, this will bring us back from facts to the normative questions that so exercised Jaspers—but now in a new form, asking whether axiality really is the origin and goal of history, or one set of cultural adaptations to humanity's changing environment.
[…]
Axial ideas were initially a response by marginal groups, mostly on the lower rungs of the elite and in societies around the edges of the great empires, to rising social development and the invention of new ways of managing states (Morris 2010: 245-63). The earliest axial ideas, offered by Confucius, Mozi, the Buddha, the Mahavira, the Hebrew prophets, and Socrates, were often quite countercultural, smacking of rebellion and alternative lifestyles.
Everywhere from Rome to China, rulers found these threatening; but everywhere from Rome to China, rulers also learned that it was easier to co-opt axial leaders than to persecute them. In the last few centuries BCE and first few CE, Confucians, Buddhists, Zoroastrians, Yahwists, and Stoics all bent their knees in the service of the state, and were often handsomely rewarded for it.
Axiality is a steadily evolving set of adaptations, not a stable state of being achieved between 800 and 200 BCE. Further transformations therefore followed in the mid-first millennium CE as the great ancient empires disintegrated. In a world where centralized authority was weakening, new, simpler versions of axial ideas— Christianity, Islam, and Mahayana Buddhism, which I like to lump together under the heading of Second-Wave Axial Thought (Morris 2010: 320-29)—proved more attractive than the old, complicated ones. We might also speak of a Third Wave of Axial Thought in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as theorists such as Thomas Aquinas, al-Ghazali, and Zhu Xi systematized Christianity, Islam, and Confucianism to fit new environments; and even a Fourth Wave in the sixteenth."
It begins with compassion. Everyone suffers and Trump and Company suffer greatly. They seek to end their suffering by finding a temporary pleasure in inflicting suffering on others. How does one not be pulled into this unending drama that finds no peace? Mere opposition turns into inflicting a vindictive suffering in return. I try to find moments to insert healing (and love) where I can, but finding those moments requires great patience and practiced equinimity.
I just can't imagine how exhausting it must be to still have to operate inside the cathedral. I haven't seen an email with any of this, much less prefered pronouns in over two years. From the outside looking in the paradoxical nature of all encompassing social pressure to resist perceived authoritarianism is fascinating.
I think, personally, the best reaction to the impending fascist takeover is to join an Elks lodge or fantasy football league and generally meet people who don't spend their time constantly refreshing Heather Cox Richardson's newsletter.
But if that isn't an option, brining in a love focused politics is till better than what it looks like is going to happen, which is libs try to do 2020 over again, but this time with a 37% approval rating.
Very well said. To orient one's whole existence around resistance to Trump (or other despot in other countries) is, in many ways, to give the despot exactly what he wants: the rush of power, the recognition that the world revolves around him. Living in such a state, it's good to take what practical steps one can toward dislodging the régime's power (such as giving to legal funds); beyond that, the best resistance is to keep calm and carry on.
Much of what you have written can be found in a slightly different form in the work of Franco Berardi. With the important difference that Berardi’s conclusions are pessimistic and demiurgical.
See e.g. Franco Berardi’s latest book “Quit Everything: Interpreting Depression”
>>>”Carl Schmitt, whose thinking, like the human/AI convergence, is yet another feature of our current technopolitical landscape that characterizes both left and right. You must, that is, reject Schmitt’s astoundingly fashionable and enduring idea that all politics can only unfold through a fundamental friend-enemy distinction; or you must be prepared to say that if that is true, then farewell to politics.”
Berardi names this move the “desertion” of the field of politics altogether. More specifically, the desertion of the field of “liberal”/authoritarian *capitalist*-oligarchical polity in which politics consists of little more than then enforced legitimation of the will of the power elite upon the populace.
The following summary provided by Perplexity AI does not full justice to Berardi’s work but nonetheless, the inquiry “what does Franco Berardi mean by "desertion"?” yields the following summary of Berardi’s *anti-political* conclusions
“A necessary withdrawal from the relentless demands of capitalism and social participation, which he links to phenomena like mass resignation from procreation, work, consumption, and political involvement.
A form of deceleration or quitting, where people refuse to engage with the expectations imposed on them by economic and social systems.
More than resignation or depression, desertion is a form of active refusal and a search for autonomy. It is seen as a potentially radical and revolutionary act against the "ethical catastrophe" of current social conditions.
A way to preserve life, social bonds, and existence in the face of worsening global crises including pandemics, climate collapse, and wars.
A "form of knowledge" or an existential gesture that challenges political norms and opens space for different ways of living and relating.”
In a similar vein to your meditations on “love”, Berardi has recollected in an elegiac mode one of the slogans of the Italian Uprisings of 1977 “happiness when collective is revolutionary”. This “revolutionary happiness” was as much directed against the regimes of the former Eastern Bloc as it was against the domestic repression and exploitation of the Italian governments of the “Years of Lead”.
But why are you so clearly embarrassed by speaking about “love” today in 2025? There is an abyssal historical gulf between the 1960s “Summer of Love” when such anti-disciplinarian, counter-cultural “happiness” – the word used by Berardi’s generation from 1968 to 1977 – may have been meaningfully political and today when all such libidinal forms have thoroughly neutered and commodified.
There's a great political economist philosopher, Keisha Ellis, from the University of The Bahamas. She just did a very nice presentation along these lines, looking at the 'future of democracy', connecting Aristotle and Locke to memes and internalised value systems that lead to class resentment. She works as the head of the largest food bank in the Caribbean, and you can see her working across all the groups involved and empathising with their thought patterns. You can see it here, starting at minute 27: https://www.facebook.com/100064752098671/videos/1100464412255829.
"So let's not call it a log-jam. Let's call it an intersectional analysis." I'm dead 💀
Nobody else writing about a love that is so absurd and politically relevant.
You have just won your own $10,000 prize.
Kadare and Kiarostami in the same post!? Two of my favourites.
tangential observation: meeting a police or National Guard presence with hate, contempt, categorical group stereotyping, and hostility is counterproductive and foolhardy. The goal is for the police and military to be on the side of the legacy of American civil liberties, which means finding ways to communicate with the individuals under the uniform without a lot of ideological noise in the way. The problems the police have been ordered to grapple with are not of their creation. Preemptively assuming that the personal loyalties of all of them must be with the forces of repression amounts to ceding a massive amount of power to the opposition.
Use the spirit of good will. You think police like being ordered out on a hot summer day to police a demonstration? Make it as easy for them--and yourselves--as possible. Don't throw bottles of water at them; put them on the front line in an ice cooler, for both sides. It might not work, at least not at first. They might be ordered to keep their game face on. Try to be friendly anyway. Talk to them without haranguing them, like actual fellow human beings. It's worth a try. At least make it clear that you aren't protesting the police forces. They did not make the rules. And really--how far is cop-baiting by a preening Children's Crusade of social justice protesters going to get, as a tactic? Getting a cop to smile or laugh is a more worthy challenge. Cop-baiting and violence is what people like Stephen Miller expect, and want. The accelerationists of the far Right are looking for that excuse. Putting the police at ease would upset that entire game.
I'm far from persuaded that the US is in the grip of incipient fascism*; it's strange to me to hear narratives from liberals that implicitly imbue the most radical and authoritarian factions of the far Right with more power and influence than they presently possess.That said, vigilance is warranted. And in the event that those forces do begin running the show by taking a radical step like attempting to suspend the Constitution and civil liberties protections to impose martial law, we are going to need police and soldiers on our side, to say No. As many as possible. The most effective way of defeating the forces of political repression is a revolt of the guards. Writing them all off in advance as Nazis or white supremacists is, shall we say, unhelpful to that project. And also ludicrous, given how many nonwhites are police or military nowadays.
[*I don't think ICE raids are per se evidence of impending fascism, either. Border security is essential to the nation-state game. Anyone who enters a country illegally knows that they don't get to make the rules to suit their personal preference. The US expelled 600,000 undocumented Mexicans in 1958. There's always an element of unfairness--and plain chance--in the matter of enforcement. But it isn't some unprecedented indication that we now live in the Fourth Reich. And yes, the Republicans refused to compromise on immigration reform with the Democrats in 2022, because Trump preferred it that way. But that problem is not to be resolved by picking fights with ICE agents. ]
I'm always up for being proved wrong, of course. Always have been.
The Internet is a peerless venue for debate--written debate having an additional advantage of being much easier to review in detail and in context--and it puzzles me why the Internet is so seldom used for that purpose. Blocking, muting, declining to hit some heart emoji and leaving in a huff is a fake substitute for actually airing things out. As is doxxing, canceling, and assassination.
Prove me wrong.
I concur with much, but not all, of what you assert, DC Reade. Trump's flooding of liberal and Democratic urban zones with what is tantamount to a private army is an indispensable stalking horse, or even Trojan Horse, to introduce and acclimate the American populace to the presence of military troops in advance of his declaring martial law under putative cover of the hundred fifty-year old Insurrection Act.
As an nonviolent, civilly-disobedient activist in favor of Civil Rights and in opposition to America's War Against Southeast Asian Peasants movements, as well as a fervent attendee at Woodstock in 1969, I can personally attest -- through direct, lived experience -- to the power of both individual and collective love, or agape, in galvanizing the 'anti-Establishment' political, social and cultural, indeed quasi-revolutionary, tenor of that era. Love animates and sustains nonviolence, and nonviolence is the only viable strategy for toppling Trump and MAGA.
What appears necessary and viable is a massive and sustained movement of strategic nonviolent action -- everything, everywhere, all at once, likely culminating in a general strike and/or mutiny within the military -- that withdraws a sufficient quotient of popular consent to effectively disable the pillars of political, economic and yes, military, support upon which the psycho-fascist Trump regime rests.
This approach is neatly and cogently explicated in this multiple award-winning, 2011 documentary film about the work of the late Gene Sharp, the world’s foremost expert on strategic nonviolent action and three-times Noble Peace Prize nominee, as a superior substitute for violence and war, interweaved with multiple, recent historical examples of nonviolence’s successes around the globe. Everyone should watch this exigent, inspirational film -- in which the power of love fuses with and is expressed by -- nonviolent action and share it with others:
“How to Start a Revolution”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKnoUbDIpjo
I'm wary of making this into anything more than a publicity stunt.
At most, the National Guard deployments are bait. If no one takes the bait, it's just one big fizzle. A non-story, after the first couple of photo ops. 500 troops in Chicago, deployed for the purpose of protecting Federal buildings that presently face no threat at all. That's the extent of the mission. If all goes well, they'll be bored out of their minds by next week.
Over 2000 Guard troops are in DC right now. They've been there a month or so. The place has a lot of Federal buildings. That's where they're "patrolling."
Agreed, it’s mostly theatrics and spectacle for the MAGA trough. You are absolutely correct to identify the critical importance that protesters and residents adopt a disciplined nonviolent response, which could include ‘turning one’s back’ and kindred methods of resistance that display indifference, mockery and superior equanimity and “love”.
I agree. I'm fine with doing advance work on tactics like mass street protests, up to and including a general strike. And all of the resistance tactics available under conditions where "heaven is high, and the emperor is far, far away." There are more responsible forms of "leaderless resistance" than isolated loners acting out their alienation with violence. Most of us have friends and co-workers. We should talk to them.
I'd also like to hear some ideas on exactly what official decrees would constitute a red line. The official political opposition to Trump has had a problem with jumping the gun literally since the day after the election, and that undercut their case badly. It's obvious that Trump just jawbones to get a rise out of his adversaries, and all too often they have a way of running with his loose talk in ways that inflate the public image of his power. False alarms and wolf-crying are just as much of a mistake as folk wisdom makes them out to be. But there is such a thing as the wolf finally showing up, so to speak. And it would be helpful to discuss what exactly would constitute unprecedented moves that are plainly unacceptable threats to Constitutional liberty.
The Trump administration is a unique case, because Trump administration is what might be termed an "undifferentiated autocracy." It's all about him as Chief Executive Officer of US, inc. He isn't a lean and hungry powermonger bent on galactic domination, like some of his courtiers. He's a whimsical decisionmaker who enjoys playing with power in the spotlight, but he's capable of taking a loss with a shrug, instead of instantly going into overdrive. He isn't the stable genius that he's ordained himself to be, but he has at least some equanimity in the face of setbacks and thwarted plans. I think that's because his priorities elevate his personal wealth accumulation over carrying out an ideological agenda. His economic policies are chicanery.
In particular, Trump's cryptocurrency bro faction appears eager to carry out an agenda with strong hints of building a turnkey operation for crony corruption. A picture that's likely to become more clear over time. I've been reading this guy https://cryptadamus.substack.com/ I'm strictly a layperson on these matters, and I'm glad someone knowledgeable is paying attention to the potential problems there. Cryptocurrency is a shady business. I find no evidence that the Trump administration has any interest in making it less shady.
It is exciting to be alive as our species gropes its way toward a new way of being. I am hopeful.
Me too.
The opening of this is very funny. I was just theorising about this topic with a friend of mine… Like what does it mean that everyone just needs to constantly talk about how awful everything is? And is that what they really believe?
I sort of suspect it’s not what they really believe… It’s just the thing they all think that they have to say all the time.
Anyway, I’m getting off the larger topic here. I just thought that was a funny evocation of this current phenomena.
It’s a tangential thought, but I’ve long believed that an essential part of American exceptionalism is that the country has never experienced war. Yes. Of course there is Grant/Sherman and the South - that was the real thing. And it still lingers generations later. But that’s it. The civil war of the 1770/80s (which is what it was, in large part) is too long ago and too successfully rewritten after the fact to count. War isn’t war until it happens in your backyard.
For Americans, war is something abstract that happens over there, even when American soldiers are fighting. If that isn’t the true, genuine, irreplaceable exorbitant privilege, then nothing is. No disrespect intended to reserve currencies.
The same thing applies to fascism/totalitarianism or even authoritarianism. Inevitably, the US has swung in that direction at times (e.g., the fights of the progressive era and the censorship of the anti-war camp in 1917, however forgotten today). But we’ve always dodged the more extreme outcomes. Geopolitical luck? National character? Who knows.
Either way, there’s a national ignorance of these things that is pretty unusual in world history. Nothing makes sense without that context. This naïveté is the country’s real superpower, for good and bad.
As religious texts go, this essay is excellent.
>>>”Wait, you’re saying, is this guy seriously proposing to talk about the place of love in politics? Isn’t this the same guy, you might further ask, who just wrote a book about doing mushrooms? At which point you might assure yourself that there’s no reason to read any further. You thought I was pushing some over-the-counter centrist Substackian bullshit about how a bird needs both its right and left wings in order to fly or whatever, but it turns out I’m still operating in psychedelic-guru mode, as some self-styled prophet of the new Age of Aquarius? You’re ready to go back to gawking at Nate Silver’s pie-charts?”
The above quoted passage is a highly amusing “Rick and Morty” type of monologue, but dare I suggest that, after the laughter has died down, this relapse into self-deprecating humour was an unfortunate form of personal defensiveness that simultaneously prevented you from seeing the Truth that you nonetheless actually gave an (inadequate) expression to . But possibly lacked the courage to face the full force of the Negative.
By “love” you clearly mean Christian Agape. So what was the blockage that prevented you from saying so? You were talking about “politics” and not..., er, something else… and so felt embarrassed to be speaking about something which in 2025 is apolitical or anti-political and is merely "religious" in the most debased bourgeois life-style choice sense of the word.
The Early Christian communities were pacifist, anti-imperialist and communist.
But that was during one of the most important Axial Ages.
Today our condition is the violent, mass-murderous anti-thesis of an Axial Age. The 2010s-2020s have been a period of terminally morbid Nihilism.
Therefore, as you yourself have perceived but lacked the fortitude to fully confront, “love” is indeed a pitiable, pathetic attempt at formulating an antidote to the Dark Ages we are within and into which we will only descend further de profundis.
On Axial Ages, I recommend from both a scholarly point of view as well as a point of historical comparison that provides commentary upon the present day, “Seshat History of the Axial Age”
https://annas-archive.org/md5/695abbb09dae2780ce0be1b6be2298de
From the Introduction:
"Seshat's data muddied Jaspers’ empirical claims about the uniqueness of the first millennium BCE to the point that they became untenable. The solution to that problem, I believe, is to make axiality part of a 300,000-year evolutionary story about human values. Inevitably, this will bring us back from facts to the normative questions that so exercised Jaspers—but now in a new form, asking whether axiality really is the origin and goal of history, or one set of cultural adaptations to humanity's changing environment.
[…]
Axial ideas were initially a response by marginal groups, mostly on the lower rungs of the elite and in societies around the edges of the great empires, to rising social development and the invention of new ways of managing states (Morris 2010: 245-63). The earliest axial ideas, offered by Confucius, Mozi, the Buddha, the Mahavira, the Hebrew prophets, and Socrates, were often quite countercultural, smacking of rebellion and alternative lifestyles.
Everywhere from Rome to China, rulers found these threatening; but everywhere from Rome to China, rulers also learned that it was easier to co-opt axial leaders than to persecute them. In the last few centuries BCE and first few CE, Confucians, Buddhists, Zoroastrians, Yahwists, and Stoics all bent their knees in the service of the state, and were often handsomely rewarded for it.
Axiality is a steadily evolving set of adaptations, not a stable state of being achieved between 800 and 200 BCE. Further transformations therefore followed in the mid-first millennium CE as the great ancient empires disintegrated. In a world where centralized authority was weakening, new, simpler versions of axial ideas— Christianity, Islam, and Mahayana Buddhism, which I like to lump together under the heading of Second-Wave Axial Thought (Morris 2010: 320-29)—proved more attractive than the old, complicated ones. We might also speak of a Third Wave of Axial Thought in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as theorists such as Thomas Aquinas, al-Ghazali, and Zhu Xi systematized Christianity, Islam, and Confucianism to fit new environments; and even a Fourth Wave in the sixteenth."
It begins with compassion. Everyone suffers and Trump and Company suffer greatly. They seek to end their suffering by finding a temporary pleasure in inflicting suffering on others. How does one not be pulled into this unending drama that finds no peace? Mere opposition turns into inflicting a vindictive suffering in return. I try to find moments to insert healing (and love) where I can, but finding those moments requires great patience and practiced equinimity.
I just can't imagine how exhausting it must be to still have to operate inside the cathedral. I haven't seen an email with any of this, much less prefered pronouns in over two years. From the outside looking in the paradoxical nature of all encompassing social pressure to resist perceived authoritarianism is fascinating.
I think, personally, the best reaction to the impending fascist takeover is to join an Elks lodge or fantasy football league and generally meet people who don't spend their time constantly refreshing Heather Cox Richardson's newsletter.
But if that isn't an option, brining in a love focused politics is till better than what it looks like is going to happen, which is libs try to do 2020 over again, but this time with a 37% approval rating.
Very well said. To orient one's whole existence around resistance to Trump (or other despot in other countries) is, in many ways, to give the despot exactly what he wants: the rush of power, the recognition that the world revolves around him. Living in such a state, it's good to take what practical steps one can toward dislodging the régime's power (such as giving to legal funds); beyond that, the best resistance is to keep calm and carry on.
Much of what you have written can be found in a slightly different form in the work of Franco Berardi. With the important difference that Berardi’s conclusions are pessimistic and demiurgical.
See e.g. Franco Berardi’s latest book “Quit Everything: Interpreting Depression”
https://z-lib.gl/book/64151180/b324b8/quit-everything-interpreting-depression.html
>>>”Carl Schmitt, whose thinking, like the human/AI convergence, is yet another feature of our current technopolitical landscape that characterizes both left and right. You must, that is, reject Schmitt’s astoundingly fashionable and enduring idea that all politics can only unfold through a fundamental friend-enemy distinction; or you must be prepared to say that if that is true, then farewell to politics.”
Berardi names this move the “desertion” of the field of politics altogether. More specifically, the desertion of the field of “liberal”/authoritarian *capitalist*-oligarchical polity in which politics consists of little more than then enforced legitimation of the will of the power elite upon the populace.
The following summary provided by Perplexity AI does not full justice to Berardi’s work but nonetheless, the inquiry “what does Franco Berardi mean by "desertion"?” yields the following summary of Berardi’s *anti-political* conclusions
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/what-does-franco-berardi-mean-NI.QaTizQb.lqQhY7AiDwg
“A necessary withdrawal from the relentless demands of capitalism and social participation, which he links to phenomena like mass resignation from procreation, work, consumption, and political involvement.
A form of deceleration or quitting, where people refuse to engage with the expectations imposed on them by economic and social systems.
More than resignation or depression, desertion is a form of active refusal and a search for autonomy. It is seen as a potentially radical and revolutionary act against the "ethical catastrophe" of current social conditions.
A way to preserve life, social bonds, and existence in the face of worsening global crises including pandemics, climate collapse, and wars.
A "form of knowledge" or an existential gesture that challenges political norms and opens space for different ways of living and relating.”
In a similar vein to your meditations on “love”, Berardi has recollected in an elegiac mode one of the slogans of the Italian Uprisings of 1977 “happiness when collective is revolutionary”. This “revolutionary happiness” was as much directed against the regimes of the former Eastern Bloc as it was against the domestic repression and exploitation of the Italian governments of the “Years of Lead”.
But why are you so clearly embarrassed by speaking about “love” today in 2025? There is an abyssal historical gulf between the 1960s “Summer of Love” when such anti-disciplinarian, counter-cultural “happiness” – the word used by Berardi’s generation from 1968 to 1977 – may have been meaningfully political and today when all such libidinal forms have thoroughly neutered and commodified.
“The Future has been cancelled”.
https://www.generation-online.org/p/fp_bifo5.htm
“After the Future”
https://z-lib.gl/book/2854293/559758/after-the-future.html
“Futurability: The Age of Impotence and the Horizon of Possibility”
https://z-lib.gl/book/29829902/c9ce66/futurability-the-age-of-impotence-and-the-horizon-of-possibility.html
The anti-political reflections and conclusions of Berardi is the greatest difference between his positions and yours.
It may also interest you that, Berardi also assigns a visionary role to psychedelics and to poetry.
There's a great political economist philosopher, Keisha Ellis, from the University of The Bahamas. She just did a very nice presentation along these lines, looking at the 'future of democracy', connecting Aristotle and Locke to memes and internalised value systems that lead to class resentment. She works as the head of the largest food bank in the Caribbean, and you can see her working across all the groups involved and empathising with their thought patterns. You can see it here, starting at minute 27: https://www.facebook.com/100064752098671/videos/1100464412255829.
Si libet, licet