The Right’s Rollercoaster to Hell

Part I: The Trump Regime

The far Right is fully in the saddle in the US. Much has been said about this, some of it wrong, some of it obvious, some of it insightful in ways that have scarcely been realized. It might be helpful to name a few of these points before getting into deeper analysis.

The first and second parts of this essay involve analyzing the State in its own terms, which may feel gross or even fatuous to many readers who care about collective survival and liberation. However, my intent is to go from there to show how a structural and strategic understanding of the Death Machine can improve our strategies for liberation.

• The Trump regime is scary. There is no doubt about this. I think these are the major factors:

  • The world itself is in a terrifying place. Capitalism is bludgeoning the planet to the point of bringing an end to the current geological epoch (and epochs usually change every few million years! This one only started 11,700 years ago!). The current world system1 that organizes nearly everything about our miserable lives is also coming to an end. That might be good news, since every world system so far has been based on colonialism and misery, but the pessimism and uncertainty about what comes next is frightening.

  • Fear is a highly collective emotion. Progressives and centrists were much less worried about the exact same problems of deadly borders, killer cops, and the ecological crisis when one of their own was in power. Now, they’re getting completely alarmist even though Trump hasn’t made these particular problems worse. What does that have to do with fear? A bigger pool allows for bigger waves.

  • Trump team’s goal is to terrify people and flaunt far Right fetishes. In the case of deportations, Trump is lagging way behind Biden. In the case of fossil fuel consumption, Biden was terrible and the jury is still out on whether Trump will be worse. But, the unpredictability and aggressive rhetoric mean that neo-Nazis and hasten-the-apocalypse evangelists are salivating while immigrant communities are being terrified on a qualitatively more intense level, and uninformed environmentalists (the vast majority of environmentalists) are trembling in a closet with the lights out.

• Trump is still an absolute moron.

  • A great example came a week ago, when his relationship with Putin finally took a definitive turn, confirmed by