The News: Apocalypse Now

Wednesday's Child Is Full of Woe

I keep circling around the cluster of people involved in Trump Administration’s programmatic disassembly of constitutional government in the United States. I feel I am pacing like a zoo animal in a cage. What are they thinking? How conscious are they of their motives? What do they represent?

I try to remember a point I’ve made many times before about governments and leaders, that almost no leader is himself or herself the pivot on which all decisions turn, that the visible leader in a political coalition like like the tip of an iceberg, representing some vaster structure hidden below the water.

Perhaps even, as the phrase goes, a deep state. Or a deep strata of society, a formation embedded across a whole geology, that suddenly erupts into the surface of the earth. American Presidents normally are just the titular heads of an assemblage of ambitious public servants and elected officials who frequently share some social connections and some loose ideological priors, somewhat like the C-suite of a corporation where the CEO speaks for a cluster of executives who’ve risen through the company and some recruited new executives whose experience elsewhere has been deemed useful or generative. (On which point, once again: the CEO is not a king except in a few rare cases of smaller privately-held companies that are led by the scion of a particular family. Maybe.)

Trump’s first administration had him as the unhappy CEO of a cluster of Republican-affiliated leaders with business experience, military experience, administrative experience and experience in electoral politics, a different cluster than the one that had risen through service in the Reagan, Bush I and Bush II presidencies. He was unhappy because his assemblage wanted to domesticate his wild impulses and careless gestures, to yoke him to something like a coherent strategic vision of governance and some degree of continuity with past Republican policy initiatives. In the end, Trump won out by attrition and began to summon an entirely new assemblage to his side, recruited first and foremost for their servility to his personal authority and impulses and secondly for the extremism of their vision, for advocacy of post-constitutional executive power.

Those people are still with him today. To that assemblage he has now added a few more representatives of other extremist lineages, most notably Steve Bannon’s “populists” and some advocates of Christian nationalist theocracy. And a new assemblage has added itself to Trumpism—or perhaps believes that it has added Trumpism to itself, namely the Big Tech billionaires club defined by Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen and associates. That this new assemblage is unstable and volatile is already very much on display—it is hard to believe that it can survive four years without a night of the long knives within the coalition—but at least for the moment it also is fueling the destruction of a long-standing constitutional republic’s basic administrative and procedural infrastructure.

As I pace mentally and try to apprehend what this coalition really wants, how it really thinks, what its aims are, I keep coming back to a repeated theme. I’ve already argued that the base of political support for this group wants to see that existing infrastructure blown six ways to Sunday, that at least some of them represent a millenarian yearning for the old world to fall so that some new world, whose nature is as yet unknown, might rise from its ashes. I now think that this might also accurately describe most or all of the people who hold power in Washington right now, that they also are millenarians, though not all of the same kind as their supporters. And perhaps some of them are something bleaker: nihilists who want to negate everything and have no hope of a new world to follow.

The desire to hasten the Second Coming, to see the last days of life in a fallen, post-Edenic world and to rise again in the world to come, is a long-standing part of American evangelical belief. As an agnostic with some appreciation for Christianity on multiple levels, I’ve always thought that any form of Christian eschatology that believes that human beings can and ought to act in a way that accelerates the prophesied end of the world is impious at best, blasphemous at worst. Who are we to force the hand of God, to believe that we can make the Second Coming happen on an accelerated schedule, as if God were some genie in a lamp to be given commands?

Be that as it may, there are many congregations and individual evangelical leaders who have felt that one way or the other, it is their task to make the world ready for the end times, to align human life with the symbols and clues embedded in scripture. That view comes bundled with a disdain for liberal, secular desires to improve the human condition towards ultimate perfection, to ameliorate pressing global-scale crises like climate change before they result in unnecessary suffering in the decades and centuries to come. It’s not merely the hope for life in this world to end and salvation in the world to come. It is also a sense that if what we are doing has ruined the world given to us, we should have to pay the price for that sin for all the future to come, however long that might last. That produces a kind of paralysis in the moment of sin: if you are a party and carrying on mightily in a way you know is self-harming, in a way that you know is casting you into some kind of hell, then why end the party in a hurry? You’ve already paid the price, so enjoy the fun for as long as it lasts. (It is not just evangelical Christians who think that way.)

There may be a second eschatology lurking inside of the current version of Trumpism within the White House, which is a belief in the Singularity, a technological end-of-the-world where our machines outdo us and subsume us, where human beings become something so different than what they have been that everything that has come before is irrelevant. I never know whether to take people from the Big Tech world seriously when they indulge in Singularity talk. A fair amount of the time, it seems more like a typically cynical move meant to hype up some shitty app or justify pointless “disruption” in the name of some future cyborg inevitability. Or in the case of the truly swollen egos at the top of the food chain, it’s a way to buttress their belief that they are already the cyborg overlords and the only problem left for them is to figure out how to live forever.

However, there are likely a few true believers scattered about who really think we are in the last days of modern human life and are shortly to transition to a world where robots or AIs do most routine forms of labor better and faster than human beings, and that the economic and political structures erected in modernity will need to be radically changed as a result. It is at least the kind of story someone can tell themselves if they are participating in the destruction of an establishment, that it was going to be destroyed anyway, so why not?

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I think there’s a much more pressing kind of mindset that is active inside the people governing in the name of Trumpism that is not overtly end-of-the-world in its nature but which amounts to a profound and dedicated indifference to long-term consequences for today’s actions.

For some years now, commenters have noted the increasing drift of businesses and civic organizations to forms of short-termism, to pursuing profits or goals in a way that seem to presume that the corporation, the line of business, or the mission is ephemeral, that acting to preserve or sustain for the long term is for naive chumps. Sure, maybe you talk some nonsense along those lines when you are giving a TED Talk or in a shareholder call, but you don’t really act on the premise that there is a tomorrow, that you are the latest link in a chain that will go on forever. You’re in it to win it right here, right now. When number goes up enough, you cash out your position and move on. Profit today is all that matters. Tomorrow can take care of itself.

I have ambivalent feelings about whether there really was long-termism in the past, whether the Protestant work-ethic was a real thing that was really associated with the rise of industrial capitalism. Whatever my doubts, I concede that there is some actual empirical evidence to that effect that can’t just be dismissed as pure ideology. For that reason, however, I also think that complaints about the short-termism of the global economy are not just moral complaints but based on something empirically real.

I think that reality stems largely from the extreme financialization of the global economy and the associated rise in dramatic wealth inequality. To put it simply, financialization means that a smaller and smaller number of people are making truly extraordinary amounts of money from having money, that investments no longer correspond to any materially real economic activity. Whether publically-traded companies have good or bad prospects for growth doesn’t matter. You take positions based on a judgment of what the market will be doing, and the market is only judging what to do from the market, not by a sober appraisal of what companies will do in the coming year, what commodities will be produced, what real-world developments might impact the economy. Whether the economy might crash doesn’t matter: from a highly financialized position you can speculate on and make money from a total economic collapse as readily as you can from growth.

Moreover, financialization to this degree also means that there are a small number of individuals and investment firms that are sitting on so much wealth that they effectively have almost nothing further to do with it and are facing the kind of crisis of accumulation that Marx first tried to envision in the 19th Century. They can’t help but make money and there’s nothing left to do with it. Imagine having a billion dollars in annual income: you would have to be a genius to find a way to spend more than a fraction of that on your own needs and desires. Or you’d have to expand your sense of need so vastly that it could never be satisfied or satiated by anything, to make a vaster void inside yourself.

These days, I think private equity buys brick-and-mortar businesses and institutions and plows them under essentially as a hobby. “Hey, Greg wants to see if you buy a department store and you make the sales associates wear bright primary colors and a clown nose while they walk around on stilts if that moves product a little faster, so let’s buy him that chain and see what happens. Remember, Phil also wants to try that thing where we make the lowest performing manager put his hand in a cobra tank to keep his job, so maybe Greg and Phil can work together?”

They buy every asset that can be bought just because it’s there, not with any plan of future returns. That was even more the case when money was essentially free to borrow and venture capitalists could underwrite a million ridiculous start-ups to see if a unicorn might spontaneously generate somewhere in the pile of dead-on-arrival corpses.

The concentration of wealth and the abstraction of financialization means that the people whose whims structure the forward motion of the economy can’t ever find a risk so big that they might actually lose their shirts. They’ve gone past “too big to fail” into “can’t fail even if they try to”.

Look at Elon Musk, who seems on paper to have lost $30 billion buying Twitter, and who is technically in charge of multiple companies in a way that is plainly impossible in terms of exerting actual leadership within them. Doesn’t matter: he had assets to spare to the point that he could and did buy a position of almost unlimited power over the entire government and the nation. He might eventually be a loser in the dangerous game of power, but he almost can’t lose in the economy that he both represents and has helped to create.

So while this isn’t a formal eschatology that some true believers might want to accelerate to a full-blown apocalypse, it is a position from which long-term risk is no longer any concern. I keep reading people saying, “They’re stupid, they don’t understand what they’re destroying, they don’t understand that they’re just hurting themselves.” That’s the point. They’re not stupid: they quite intelligently understand that they no longer need any of what they are destroying and that they no longer care about the long-term. The only thing that matters is the pleasure of power right here, right now. Let us eat, be in a k-hole and have a ton of fun laying waste to an entire society, for tomorrow we might live forever. Even if we don’t, we can’t possibly lose whatever we do.

Put all of that together and you have a lot of people in charge who are fundamentally immune to arguments couched in terms of prudence, risk, duty, that are about preserving what you have today in order to pass it to your heirs. It’s the end times. Or it’s that this moment is the only thing that matters. Screw our kids and our families, who cares about them. (I suspect this is one of the few things that Musk and Trump really share as an outlook.)

There may be one group of long-term thinkers in the White House, but they’re no more reassuring. Those are the people who recognize that the Rubicon has been crossed and the die is cast. They either win forever or end up in jail. That is a mindset that can easily reconcile itself to millenarian thinking or to living like there’s no tomorrow: it all points in the same direction as a first step, which is to destroy everything that already is.