"America Implodes"

Thiago Opperman

Well, what do people think? What are some readings of this? Somehow, it's
hard to believe that this was just a matter of there being indifference to
the options (turnout was the highest in forty years) and it's pretty
difficult to argue there was no difference between candidates. It's also
pretty difficult to say it doesn't matter.

So why is it that when faced with a rich kleptocratic lying swindler
fundamentalist and a rich technocratic opportunistic swindler aristocrat,
people chose the former? It's very hard not to gather the impression that
the American proles — the sprawlingly ugly, fat, lazy, contented, bigoted,
analphabetic, credulous, stupid, cruel, humourless wastes between the
Appalachians and the Sierra Nevada — really do prefer to have messianic,
one-eyed idiots as their rulers. But why? It's a question of serious import
to any class analysis with the slightest interest in the human material that
composes the lower class in the most advanced capitalist country.We should analyse this.

But are we going to coddle the inhabitants of this vast human latrine by
saying they were cajoled into voting? That, to me, would be the most
astounding stupidity. Redneck subjectivity is much more active than that; it
is indeed a language of class rebelion like nothing the world's ever seen.
This, in my opinion, is the shocking mistake of Negri and Hardt: to think
that class is constituted in the 21st century in terms of multitude of —
really, this is the only word for it — civic agents engaged in a
multiplicitly of nice progressive struggles, while the real articulation of
class par excellence, that is to say the toxic mass sprawled across America,
is just excised surgically from the multitude proper.

Thomas Frank, not Negri and Hardt, has perceived what needs to be perceived.
The Republican Party has managed to hammer a vast movement together, a horde
of people who believe that there are Angels, that Saddam's behind 9/11 and
that Liberals are their class enemy. Which is, of course, true, but for all
the wrong reasons and leading to all the wrong conclusions. Never mind how
fair it is to these fucking lemmings to say that they are delusional — let's
ask: what is the meaning of this? What if they are not deluded? What if this
apparently suicidal will to ignorance is the only class formation that is
possible given the current arrangement of ideological forces in the US? What
happened here? How can it be stopped? Or is the world just going to stumble
on towards the full actualization of whatever narcissistic orality lurks in
the unconcious of these God-fearing fucks, while we in this list sooth
ourselves with the irrelevance of the world beyond the circle of people who
can decode Negri?

The only hope I have left now is that such is the swell of this mass
insanity that it will eventually prove as uncontrollable to its instigators
as it has proven to the Democrats it was unleashed against. That's usually
been the lesson to be drawn from millenarian movements, and it is always the
one that millenarianists cannot draw, for only in the present can there be
the possibility of a millenium, and it is for that reason utterly unlike
anything before it.