GABlog Generative Anthropology in the Public Sphere

One of GA’s important insights is that a conversation, as an exchange of words, is analogous to other forms of exchange including market transactions. And that such exchanges function to defer violence when they include a degree of reciprocity. What makes an exchange “reciprocal”? In a conversation, that means that I am willing to hear what others say (seriously hear, take into consideration in my responses) in exchange for the same from them. In an economic transaction, that means that the transaction is accepted by both parties as mutually beneficial. In general, we can say that an exchange is reciprocal when it is freely entered into (and it can be exited at any time), and it is perceived as “fair,” or mutually beneficial. To some extent, such exchange is its own goal. But in the public sphere, say the letters section of a newspaper, people exchange words for a definite purpose, which is to convince others of one’s point of view.

In the classroom, the student exchanges money, time, and attention for specific goals: knowledge and skills which may be valuable in various ways. The teacher provides students the opportunity to learn knowledge and skills. The benefit may be economic or not. Knowledge and skills can be intrinsically valuable apart from their economic exchange value.

The ideal of “student-centered learning” is valid, in my view, because student engagement is the sine quo non of learning. As the saying goes, I can explain it to you, but I can’t understand it for you. As Socrates demonstrated long ago, dialogue is productive of knowledge. Socrates’s “teaching” was based on his desire to learn. He asked his interlocuters to teach him. His teaching was open to learning. Socrates can be said to have invented the idea of student-centered learning. Some professors take the Socratic ideal to mean that knowledge is “constructed” and lacks any objectivity, but I’m not in that camp; although I agree that ultimately everything is up for debate, if the interlocuters make that choice. We can make more progress, however, by agreeing on some basic premises, just as Socrates established agreement on basic facts or claims, then moved on to further questions and logical consequences.

GA also tells us that all human interactions are subject to resentment, and this includes classroom interactions. People tend to generalize about their experiences with authority figures, so that resentment for teachers may reflect their experience with prior authority figures more that any particular teacher. Teachers need to remember this sometimes.

Open-ended learning is one goal of education, but there are also knowledge and skills which have been refined and tested over thousands of years, the value of which find wide acceptance in a variety of spheres, including economic. Students pay for time with a teacher because of his/her expertise in accepted knowledge and skills.

The point I want to make here is that reciprocity is relative to the goal of a particular exchange. Reciprocity in the classroom is not achieved by accepting the student’s opinions as equal to the professor’s knowledge. Reciprocity is achieved when the exchange (of student’s time, money, and attention for the learning opportunities provided by a teacher) is entered into freely and perceived as fair.

The goal of education, for students, is learning, in the form of knowledge and skills. The problem arises when the goals are not well-defined. In schools, there are a multitude of pressures for lowering the standards of knowledge. Acquiring knowledge and skills is extremely difficult, and not every student is willing to make the sacrifice. The value of the targeted knowledge and skills is not accepted by many students and, now, professors too. This situation leads to a lot of resentment and the perception of unfairness. The problem, in my view, comes down to assessing the students’ knowledge and skills. And we can’t do this without some kind of standard. Learning goals in education are generally defined very vaguely. Students often perceive the assessment of their learning as completely subjective: “the professor didn’t like my paper.” As if the grade was given on purely subjective grounds. For now, this is an insoluble problem, because professors can’t agree on what specific knowledge and skills are necessary and valuable, or what the standards should be; students, of course, follow suit. There are larger social and economic pressures which foster this situation. However, having clearly defined and transparent goals for a particular class, and applying those standards impartially, will help defer resentment. Professors can do this now, despite the larger social situation. Professors, however, need the support of colleagues and administrators in order to maintain high standards. The general trend is towards the lowering of standards, for a variety of reasons.

It’s interesting to see people get offended and angry in online discussions—they curse each other, threaten each other, try to demean and humiliate each other. In other words, they act according to codes of an honor society in a medium that renders those codes completely irrelevant. That irrelevance has long been the case with print, as well, but online communication seems to revive the remnants of oral cultures because the exchanges take place in the present. The culture of meme-ing, meanwhile, makes it clear that online communication favors brief, memorable “detournements” of powerful images and clichés, frame-switching of opponents’ arguments, and casual taboo breaking. Such memes can travel nearly instantaneously, are immediately intelligible, and force responses that reveal something about the responder we might not have known otherwise.

This is to make the obvious point that meaning depends upon medium. But there are some less obvious consequences to this observation. Relying upon David Olson’s analysis of the metalanguage of literacy and classic prose, I’ve proposed that we can see writing, in relation to speech, in mimetic terms, as seeking to “saturate” the assumed speech situation represented in writing. In an oral situation, constituted by physical presence, you can shake your fist at your interlocutor—undoubtedly that once has a real meaning, showing that one was refraining from violence for the moment, but was making no guarantees should things escalate. It’s hard to imagine someone doing that now, even in the most heated argument. This doesn’t mean that the written text needs the equivalent of shaking one’s hand in anger—the fact of widespread literacy transforms social order, or entails a transformed social order, such that a certain distance from violence can be assumed, rather than having the line at which we pass into violence represented regularly. This is the first problem with classical prose, then—it simulates a speech situation—the reader and writer as interlocutors made present on a shared scene by the writer’s prose—that is really an ersatz one.

Marshall McLuhan was at least partially right to say that the content of a new medium is the older medium it is replacing or supplementing. Certainly, radio tries to reproduce the intimacy of a one on one conversation, and, for a long time, TV shows were basically filmed theatrical productions and extended vaudeville skits. And they try to saturate the space they purport to merely reproduce: in radio it might be the cultivation of (not necessarily “authentic”) regional idiosyncrasies, or an avuncular, reassuring vocal presence; in the TV shows of the 50s and 60s, a kind of artificial national idiom was created, probably based on some variant of Midwestern speech. Not surprisingly, these are the features of older samples of these media that both evoke nostalgia and are easiest to parody (which makes them a great source of memes). If we are committed to submitting all of the concepts and categories presented to us by the liberal order to painstaking, unrestrained interrogation, we should accept the modernist aesthetic dictum that the capabilities and possibilities of the media as media should be explored, rather than thinking in terms of representing the same content in one form or another. The concept of a “disciplinary space” is meant to help us do that—if there is a universal across all media, it is not content or ideas, but that any medium is a distinctive way of organizing attention.

The problem with classical prose, and, more generally, the imperative to saturate the scene of one media with terms and tropes from another is that a lot of material that hasn’t been properly “inspected” finds its way into your representations. It’s easiest to reach for the familiar in filling in the gaps left in trying out new media. One of the most revelatory effects of Goggle’s Ngram reader is the realization that concepts, words, that seem so natural as to be permanent features of the social landscape are quite recent creations and, in fact, deliberately created artifacts of the propaganda needs of World War II and then the Cold War. “Liberal democracy,” “Judeo-Christian,” “separation of Church and state,” “free market,” “nation of immigrants,” “racism,” and much more—none of them pre-date, in any significant way, World War II. The problem (well, one problem) with contemporary conservatives is that they’re still fighting the wars against the Nazis and the Soviets, like the proverbial Japanese solider lost on a Pacific island and never hearing about his country’s defeat. These terms are in turn embedded in larger networks of terms, which are in turn rooted in the disciplines upon which we rely in order to say pretty much anything. (The “separation of Church and state” becomes a serious topic in political science.) All of our thinking apparatuses need to be thoroughly overhauled.

These concepts, which weigh down our thinking in ways that require continuous effort to notice, are in turn only the visible feature of habits, gestures, reactions and reflexes and that just as grounded in media, histories, and power struggles as the concepts themselves. Part of the purpose of the “originary grammar” I keep returning to, that is, the attempt to reduce all discourse to some relation between ostensive, imperative and declarative signs, is to help us in stripping all discourse and all disciplines of everything “unvetted,” everything bearing liberal assumptions or implications, precisely in the most take for granted places. Part of contemporary reactionary thought, of course, is the return to “old books” and therefore old and discarded concepts, and nothing I say here counters that practice at all, since retrieving, for example, the distinction between warriors, craftsmen and priests in the ordering of communities serves the same corrosive effect upon liberal concepts. But, of course, maybe society can no longer or should no longer be ordered in that way—these older concepts also need to be tested against what I think is the one criterion all post-liberals and anti-liberals can share: a privileging of order over freedom, however defined. We want to make order where we see disorder, and I think order can only mean defense of a center. If in fact, no social order can now be reduced to warrior/craftsman/priest that by no means invalidates the concepts (in general, we can be in much less of a rush to invalidate concepts—why not keep them around in case they prove useful at some point?); rather it renders that trichotomy a source of hypotheses and thought experiments.

We could spend all of our time (I don’t say that we should) studying the discourses around us, including those of our fellow reactionaries, in search of concepts, words, phrases, even stylistic tics that have previously unnoticed tendrils reaching into the dense network of liberal power concepts. This would be time very well spent. It need not be antagonistic at all—quite to the contrary, it’s a kind of civil hygiene we would be performing for each other. Some of the most pioneering work done along these lines has been by the proprietor of the now defunct blog Reactionary Future, with its most important result to date being his Patron Theory of Politics. At least one of the future directions of such work will involve making thinking increasingly hypothetical. To question the meaning of a word or term is to treat it as a hypothesis: what follows from describing phenomena in these ways? The purpose of my concept of a “sovereign imaginary” is the same: when you say something is good or bad, right or wrong, desirable or undesirable, that we “should” or “must” do this or that, what form of central power would make possible the relation between what you say and what you take to be the “payoff” or “downstream” of what you say? Everything we say or do entails a hypothesis regarding the sovereign order making that saying or doing possible and intelligible.

In a sense, I am proposing a kind of freedom of thought, one already practiced by many on the new or dissident right (which makes it possible for me to reflect upon it). We’re not obliged, nor does it always serve our purposes, to “prove” that we have a better theory of “human nature” or “social structure,” or to provide, on demand, iron-clad “alternatives” to the seemingly carved in the stone of history liberal order. It’s not as if we shouldn’t do these things, if they seem useful—my point is that these are not rules we need play by. Liberalism thoroughly saturates today’s media-scape, and a lot of what we can do is facilitate liberalism’s own self-dialogues, its incessant, narcissistic babblings. It’s helpful to point out that the truth of the matter is almost always pretty much exactly the opposite of what the liberal says; indeed, what liberals say is almost invariably a way of avoiding some damaging truth. My own approach, which I of course hope others will find compelling, is to keep asking about origin, center, power, deferral and discipline, questions liberalism must avoid under penalty of brain death.

To think and speak hypothetically is to “de-saturate.” It’s very easy to think in terms of being a “man speaking to men,” thereby evoking a speech situation in which one anticipates responses, seeks “common ground,” appeals to approved attitudes, and so on—these are some of those deeply embedded reactions and reflexes I referred to before. Instead, why not think of one’s reader or listener as a vehicle conveying a kind of irresistible, minimal, model, whether by endorsement or opposition? I began by mentioning the absurdity of taking offense in online discussions, but it’s actually pretty absurd anywhere—if you’re not going to demand satisfaction in duel, what’s the point? Getting offended just gives others needless power over you—if they know what offends you, they know how to jerk you around. (I’m speaking here of people who actually take offense, not of the big business of taking offense for rent-seeking purposes—but, of course, the latter can only persist if the former is still practiced.) If we can learn these things through a new medium we can apply it to older ones, which in turn get situated within the “media ecology” in a new way.

I come back to that here because once we target, analytically, an archaic or useless attitude, the next step is to ask what might replace it. What would take the place of offending and being offended—an interesting thought experiment, I think. (One can say part of being human is being offended by violations of reciprocity—but we don’t know that. There are all kinds of ways of detecting, assessing and responding to violations of norms. Referring to what we must be “as humans” is one of the last resorts of scoundrels.) To be offended is to take the meaning of a remark to be some present or possible future lowering of status, it is to see oneself singled out as a more likely center of resentment and therefore target of violence. The first question, then, is whether the remark indeed portends some deleterious centering of the offended: what hypothesis regarding possible targeting is one entertaining? To pose the question is already to make it possible to defer any such danger. If you can’t really point to any danger, maybe you’re the one who is looking to attack pre-emptively. In what way might the offensive remark be fair or just? (What is the scenic meaning of “fairness” and “justice”—what sovereign imaginary comes with each concept?) If there is some way, then we are looking into the sovereign imaginary shared by offender and offended; if there is absolutely no way, if the remark must be deemed sheer, utter, vitriol, then taking offense is particularly ridiculous—the other is admitting his impotence, since he clearly wants to commit violence but realizes he can’t. Instead of taking offense and devising some “proportional” response, the situation can be used to create memes regarding the paradoxes of simultaneously denying and establishing hierarchies and paradoxes. Using situations to promote such hypothetical thinking will, eventually, lead us to the theories of the human and the social, and the “concrete alternatives” that we will need.

Now, of course, there are times when it is good policy to affect taking offense, to demand apologies, insist on reparations, etc., in whatever form a particular medium provides for. But to think in such terms is to already “de-saturate,” to distance oneself from an imagined speech situation, and to try and figure out how to generate a simulacrum. This is part of the study of meaning: how does the other’s words and actions, within a given power structure, on the margins of a particular center, commit that other in ways that make it possible to help him reveal himself? To approach meaning in this more disciplinary way is to ask what imperatives someone’s words and actions issue to him, which it turn makes it possible to try out ways of amplifying the imperative.

I am trying to develop a mode of political thinking that is not a political philosophy. A political philosophy, like any philosophy, has “first principles,” and then starts “deducing” secondary principles from the first one (freedom, consent, the will of the people, etc.) including justifications of monarchy in terms of such principles, like the monarch as serving the people, or God, or constrained by “natural law.” All these “principles,” and the institutions with which they become co-dependent, are endless sources of imperio in imperium, installing the assumption that the ruler must be justified, opening up the constant struggle over who controls the means of justification. Instead, I begin anthropologically, or anthropomorphically, with the assumption of a relation to the center, a sacred center, and, with regard to politics proper, a sacred center that has been occupied by a human. In that case, we can remain focused on actual and possible relations between margins or peripheries and the center.

A sacred center is an object of devotion and love, a source of life and everything life provides, and therefore also a source of fear and obedience and recipient of supplications. Our only question is what the center wants from and for us. We turn to the center in times of despair, doubt, hope and triumph: all mimetic emotions. The center rewards, punishes, guides. We must interpret the center as doing all this, of course, and we can do so because the center is comprised of our “donation” of all these mimetic desires and resentments. If I am outraged by my fellow, if I refrain from committing violence against him it is because once, on the originary scene, the central object told the participants there to refrain from engaging in such violence at a similar moment of high tension, and we, the community, or, rather, our language and the stories we tell in it, “remember” that scene—it is that recollection that stays my hand, and informs any subsequent punishment I might receive for failing this test of deferral. But novel situations are always occurring, and we need to continue donating more of the language we arrive at in addressing these novelties to the center. Otherwise, the advice and commands it delivers will fail.

Sacral kingship was once such a novelty, as was the Big Man that preceded it. The Big Man is the first to usurp the center and take upon himself the responsibility for distribution: within the gift economy he was eventually able to so smother his rivals with gifts as to bankrupt them, so to speak, thereby turning his entire relation to the community as a whole into a gift economy. The Big Man attains and maintain his position based on “merit”—he really has to provide for the community. He becomes a king in being sacralized, which really means in being killed in a (before or after the fact) ritual manner. It this then that the king takes on all the attributes of the sacred center, which is to say becomes the source of benefits and disasters, the link between the community and the cosmos. Such kings are often sacrificed, and the sacrifice is often built into the “office” itself. No doubt the terms, forms and timing of such sacrifices were dependent upon emergent power relations within the community, which is to say sacral kingship was itself highly defective in centralizing and clarifying power relations: rather than smart-ass lawyers bringing his right to rule into question, it would be some medicine man or witch. But it would still be unimaginable that there might be no one at the center.

We can assume that there were kings who preferred to delay their sacrifice, indefinitely, if possible, and found the means to do so, perhaps deferring the sacrificial ritual to their natural death and burial. Such kingship is still sacred, the king is still the father of his people, the source of all boon, etc., and elaborate ceremonies and exalted offices are created and given the sanction of tradition and divine origin so as to sanctify his rule. Creating such buffers between the ruler and ruled requires wealth, which requires conquest and slavery, which requires wealth. The effectiveness of rule becomes more measurable: we can see the difference between a king who conquers and one who is defeated, between one who enriches at least significant portions of the people and one who impoverishes them. At the very least, tacit “justifications” for at least a particular ruler take shape, and can be explicitly formulated by those closest to the king. A kind of dialectic is formed between rulers and those to whom the most important tasks of advice and organization are delegated: they are most dependent upon this particular ruler, but are also best positioned to see his weaknesses, while needing to find ways to communicate awareness of those weaknesses to the ruler himself. Meanwhile, the vast majority of the population couldn’t care less whether this or that king rules over them: it is the king and those who are masters of the traditions ensuring his rule. The difference between the occupant of the center and what we could call the meaning of the center, is already opened, at least a crack: kingship is not wholly embodied in the existing king, whose centrality is somewhat indirect.

That distance is the problem we have to solve. Having the king ordained by God obviously doesn’t solve it—it simply highlights the fact that what God has ordained He can unordain, and who is privy to God’s will on this question? We have to accept the break with sacral kingship once and for all. This is no simple manner, and anyone who thinks we have accomplished it by establishing secular rule doesn’t pay much attention to what people, even in the most “advanced” societies, expect of their rulers. It is repeatedly pointed out that economic growth, unemployment, technological development, and so on, are only tangentially and in highly complicated ways related to policies enacted by the President, but all of that is irrelevant: everyone speaks with complete certainty of the “Obama economy” or the “Trump economy,” as if, just as with the sacral kings of old, all benefits and calamities follow directly from the hand of the ruler. He is still the link, if not quite between the community and the cosmos (although the global warming scare brings us fairly close to this as well), then between the community and all the resources available to, and goods produced by, the community. The president is still there to slay our enemies, domestic and foreign, to stand in for the community as a whole, is still surrounded by quasi-sacrificial rituals of initiation, testing, ascent into the pavilion of honored (or descent into the Hades of dishonored) predecessors. Nor does progressive iconoclasm do the trick: it is very easy to see that it is progressives more than anyone else who repeatedly put all their eggs into the basket of a single sacred figure, whether it be Fidel, Hugo, or Bernie. Legends of the sacrifices undergone by such figures are told for decades afterwards.

The point is not to reduce the ruler to a “manager” of costs and benefits measured in a utilitarian manner. The occupant of the center cannot be divested of the meaning of the center—the question is how to invest him with it. I would like to keep things simple, non-metaphysical, non-philosophical, non-theological, and yet not “secular” either. Someone has to occupy the center: the most liberal and democratic societies have acknowledged this while trying evade doing so explicitly by devising methods for placing someone at the center as convoluted and bizarre as those of the most primitive sacral kingship. So, that’s a “premise.” Another premise is that whoever is at the center issues commands. Again, all the checks and balances in the world, all the rights and courts and human rights groups in all the world cannot deny this. Indeed, all the obstruction and protest and shrieking is to get the ruler to issue their commands. A third premise: commands are not implemented automatically. Someone must obey them, and there is always, even if ever so slightly, some difference between the command issued and the command obeyed. No command can be framed in such as way are to make it unequivocally applicable to all possible instances of its implementation. So, one final premise: the difference between the occupant of the center and the meaning of the center is replicated or iterated in the difference between the command issued and the command obeyed.

The occupant of the center is still, in fact, the source of all bounty for the community, just as was the case for the sacral king; the difference, now is that this bounty is now manifested in our obedience to the imperatives issued by the center. The sacral king was responsible for a crop or a hunt sufficient to see the people through the season; we know that our plenty today depends upon agricultural machinery, scientifically developed pesticides and genetic modifications and skilled labor within and well beyond agriculture itself—but all of that depends upon an orderly relation to the ruler. That orderly relation lies in the obedience to increasingly abstract and specialized commands, some of which are commands to scientists, managers and executives to provide the ruler with the commands he needs to issue. The meaning of the center is in the subjects’ form of obedience to imperatives to the center—this form is determined by every subject attempting to determine how the ruler, mediated, of course, by the various layers of authority through which the commands comes, would have this imperative obeyed here and now. This, of course, can be done resentfully, for example, in the form of “malicious compliance.” But that doesn’t really matter. We are not interested in peering into the mind, heart or soul of each and every subject but of developing the discourses, the language, in which one must learn to speak of “what one is doing.” If the only legitimate explanation for why you do one thing or another is some version of “because the command I received left open this margin of decision and, based on the pattern of commands I am accustomed to and my own disciplinary experience and expertise, the decision I made seemed best to complete the imperative originating from the center,” the occupant of the center is invested with its meaning. That meaning lies in the definition and articulation of the margins through their orientation toward the center.

We can see the cultural implications of the closing of the gap between the occupant and meaning of the center. The arts, education, morality, ethics, leisure, and so on would all be shaped by the imperative to close this gap. Similar gaps or distances exist in all our relations with each other, and are a constant source of misunderstandings, pleasures, tragedies, comedies and learning everywhere. Drawing attention to this fundamental paradox—the more I follow the imperative the more it follows me—is a basic prerequisite for any cultural proficiency, for any form of maturity. It’s impossible to say which genres, which methods, which faiths, which entertainments will be best equipped to be reconstituted along these lines, but at least most of them, we can imagine, will be welcome to try. We can even get started on this now, by forming the master discipline: the study of the imperative order.

President Trump’s (central, animating) concern for sovereignty, while certainly not aiming at the abolition of democracy, allows us to see the way there through the extinction of the Left that concern presupposes. Trump’s idea seems to be the simple one that governments should govern, i.e., oversee the interactions of a particular people located on a particular territory, which means those with responsibility should issue commands that should in turn be fulfilled; that is, there should be a commensurability between power and responsibility.  Accordingly, Trump targets three obstacles to such commensurability, which is to say three forms of interfering power that aim at introducing incommensurability between power and responsibility. The first is transnational corporate interests, which use economic power to blackmail and bribe politicians and impose policies on individual states and aim at breaking up coherent nations: i.e., globalism (supported by conservatives). The second is forms of political power that leverage the instruments of destabilization built into liberalism, such as equal rights, human rights, and judicial delay, the media, the academy (“civil society”) to short-circuit commands on their way to implementation: i.e., the political left. The third is insubordination within the state itself, within the vast extent of its permanent institutions, whose members outlast any particular government and therefore (quite reasonably) feel their expertise and long-term responsibility should override any “irresponsible” short-term, politically motivated, incompetent decisions made by mere elected officials: i.e., the “deep state,” or the “swamp.” This third element is, furthermore, the conduit through which the other two exercise their power, through regulatory capture, the circulation of information, the promise of lucrative jobs in the private sector, intimate connections between government, media and academy, and so on: Moldbug’s “Cathedral,” with its permanent Inquisition, in short. (Immigration, especially illegal immigration, is such a central concern because it brings together all three of these obstacles to sovereignty.)

I am one of those who credits Trump with being quite aware of this configuration and as having a plan and method for attacking it; at the very least, it’s worth working under the assumption that he does if for no other reason than that imagining the success of his plan and method provides us with a way of plotting out a particular path, within the liberal democratic order, towards the end of that order—towards, well, order. The way of controlling transnational economic interests is, in the first instance, simple: assuming state control over cross border economic activity through tariffs and trade agreements with individual countries (who are thereby encouraged to exercise similar power themselves), on the one hand, and closely regulating or even eliminating immigration, on the other. The problem with implementing and sustaining such policies, though, lies in the other two obstacles to sovereignty. The vast majority of Republicans still oppose Trump on “free trade” grounds, and those Republicans are amply rewarded by corporate interests within the revolving door system of moving from elected official to lobbyist—the implication of which is that the more established political figures, at least, need not fear losing elections, since plush jobs await them in the “private” sector. So, somehow, this system needs to be broken. It does not seem to me that Trump has a plan to do so directly, which would indeed be difficult: even campaign finance reform, which couldn’t get past these very Republicans couldn’t do anything about the revolving door, and past a certain point would be invalidated by the supreme Court, wouldn’t really work anyway (instead of giving money to politicians or political parties you give money to lobbying groups who groom and completely control candidates); while term limits might give lobbyists and their clients even more power over inexperienced and easily intimidated and bribed legislators. But the President doesn’t need much Congressional support to withdraw from existing trade agreements and make new ones—Trump’s relation to the GOP congress so far seems to be to just get as much as he can out of them.

It is also, needless to say, difficult to get at the “civil society” institutions directly. The decline and crisis of the media and academy should be accelerated and exacerbated, and Trump’s method of treating much of the media as, essentially, a combatant, which forces the media to respond in kind with increasing explicitness and shamelessness, is effective. Perhaps creative ways of using RICO statues could be employed at some point. The universities could be buried in lawsuits on various civil rights grounds (affirmative actions, restriction of free speech, etc.), harassed with DOE “instructions” that force administrators to confront faculty, students and donors in various ways. Grounds can be created for defunding particularly egregious examples, and then the threshold of “egregiousness” can be continually lowered. It’s risky, but the tech giants (for starters) can be pressured to offer their own training programs in math and the sciences for high school students in exchange, say, for a certain period of “apprenticeship,” thereby bypassing one of the university’s primary functions and putting them on the road to obsolescence. I don’t see any reason to assume that Trump or anyone in his circle has any of this in mind, but these kinds of measures follow from the mindset that seems natural to Trump and his team, which is to treat these institutions as “enemies of the American people”—moreover, Trump, if he gave it much thought, would probably be appalled at how ineffectively the schools and universities do much of what they are supposed to do. (And at how the universities have become an increasingly effective mechanism of wealth and technology transfer to China, and undoubtedly a conduit of much espionage as well.)

But there is a very clear and direct way to deal with the activist elements of “civil society” such as Antifa, BLM and the others—enforce the law. If the government enforces the law and insists (again, through the use of ruinous lawsuits, among other methods) that other institutions (like universities) follow their own rules, much of the sting of the left can be removed. This is very important to keep in mind: without constant, in-your-face lawbreaking and rule-breaking, the left is utterly ineffective. But this further means that neutralizing the third obstacle, insubordination within the state apparatus itself, is a very good way of netting the perpetrators of the other obstacles. Without powerful allies within the state apparatus, corporate and civil society defectors would be powerless. So, the entire problem, hypothetically at least, can be reduced to establishing a clear chain of command within those apparatuses, which also means expelling the traitorous elements. Easier said than done, but saying it is the first step towards doing it, and this is where I do think Trump is focusing his efforts. One way, for example, both corporate and leftist interests are “laundered” through the state is via the “leak” system uniting insubordinate state agents and media operatives (and through them the Democrat party and left more generally). Leaks are, of course, illegal, but also very difficult to stop, and are a very powerful weapon. The President institutes a new policy—strategically placed leaks gradually discredit it, suggesting it is based on lies, or corruption or incompetence, while the very fact of the leaks themselves seems to prove all this. At this point, I’m not sure it’s an exaggeration to say that the media is really nothing more than a leak delivery system, that is, does nothing more than convey the perspectives of dissident and power seeking elements of the state apparatus, especially the “intelligence community.”

To a certain extent, then, the entire problem of sovereignty can be concentrated in the power of the leak—at least in the US, right now. You can fire leakers, you can jail them, you can find out who they are and keep them out of the loop or use them for your own purposes, which is to confuse and humiliate your enemies in the media and elsewhere. It’s too soon to say for sure, but I think that Trump is doing all of the above—there hasn’t been much jailing yet, but that might be coming up pretty soon. On the really important issues, like Trump’s negotiations with North Korea, and whatever support he’s given to the Saudi-Israeli alliance to shut down Iranian influence in the region, there seem to have been no leaks. His Supreme Court pick, Brett Kavanaugh, was not, of course, a big surprise but everyone seemed nevertheless to be left guessing, including some claiming to have “sources close to the President.” If Trump succeeds in shutting down this means of controlling the administration in power (the ongoing blackmail represented by the possibility of dropping devastating leaks at any time), the forms taken by anti-sovereignist efforts must become more explicit and hysterical, reverting to more overt forms of rule-breaking and self-discrediting accusations. And not only can those be suppressed, but in the process local jurisdictions supporting disorder can in turn be countered and disempowered. There really is nothing stopping Trump’s DOJ from arresting the mayors of “sanctuary cities” and governors of sanctuary states: this is what insurrection looks like. Always target law breaking and rule breaking, which means targeting the transgressions of the enforcers themselves: all sovereignist politics can be compassed by the imperative to guard the guardians. Targeting the swamp, then, gets you the most bang for your buck.

But it’s easy to see the problem here: this kind of systematic extirpation of anti-sovereign activities must be a long-term project. Even if Trump can keep this up and clean up much of the swamp in two terms, if he’s succeeded by a Democrat or even a normal Republican there’s no reason to think it all won’t be overturned, and a kinder, gentler policy towards the permanent state restored. And, furthermore, if he uses legal methods to harass and punish his enemies in the opposing party and opposing media, the succeeding government will do the same and put Trump’s people and the media that supported him in jail. And this very possibility will lead current supporters of Trump to hesitate in treating political criminality criminally, and it will lessen the constraints on the opposition, as they can just wait for their side to come back in—even if some unavoidable sacrifices must be accepted in the meantime. In other words, the transformation needs to be made as permanent as institutional transformations can be, which means that Trump would have to aim at making them permanent. But the only way Trump can do that is by producing a new breed of (mostly) men to run the state apparatus and transforming his voter base into something like a soldiery, with its own media and ultimately educational apparatus (either new ones or, for economy’s sake, a takeover of the old ones) making it capable of sticking a single unanimous middle finger to the blackmail and vendettas of the left. This is something that I see no indication Trump has given any thought to, but he has given some thought to an essential precondition of addressing it, which is downsizing considerably the American empire—with that empire being one important conduit of globalizing power sources. Once downsized (e.g., by removing American protection from Europe and East Asia and delegating to Middle East powers responsibility for policing the region), it will be almost impossible, short of a new war, to “upsize” again.

So, only some kind of increasingly unopposed government can produce the extinction event of the left, which is to say, dissolve the interlocking subversions of global, civil society and intra-state powers and identify and extirpate the shoots of any resurgence. We can see this from other states that are much further along the path than the US, who have the simultaneously more difficult and easier problem of combating US-originated sources of subversion. The best example today is Viktor Orban’s Hungary, which has simply refused to accept the EU-imposed refugee regime, and is capable of doing so in large part by keeping George Soros-affiliated organizations out of the country. Orban has been in power since 2010, and just won an election by a larger margin than the previous one (his margin is even larger if one includes the parties to his right). Why shouldn’t he be in power another 10 years or more? And if he is, shouldn’t he bequeath to his successors the absolute ban on both immigration and externally funded “civil society” organizations? In Israel, the left has been out of power for almost 20 years, and the Israelis have also realized that a key to making this permanent is sharply limiting externally funded “human rights” and other groups. Poland is perhaps on a similar route, and maybe even Erdogan in Turkey, in his own clumsy, lurching way. A virtuous circle might be at work here, as the elimination of outside, globalizing influences reduces the internal opposition to negligible status, leading to minimal conflict and increasingly trivial elections—perhaps the elections will ultimately become vestigial, or really just a way of keeping political leaders already working within a fairly narrow consensus honest. And then, who knows?

To return, then, to the American context, let’s say that the Republican majority gets a bit bigger in 2018 and then 2020. Starved of the oxygen generated by the stoppage of “leakage” (and other measures like breaking the backs of public employee unions) the Democrats further marginalize and destroy themselves. The media becomes increasingly irrelevant. With the immediate threat of Democratic takeover diminished, Trump can work harder on disciplining the GOP, replacing globalists with Trump-loyal nationalists. A 6-3 or 7-2 majority on the Supreme Court cuts that off as a vehicle of subversion. Elite money starts to flow toward the forces of order (why give money to ineffectual hysterics, especially ones who had the world at their feet and blew it?); right wingers or just normal people in the media and educational institutions start to feel safer as the left is deprived of its ability to carry out reprisals on dissidents and the insufficiently enthusiastic. A few election cycles down the road, what would there be to argue about, or vote about? Whether tariffs on China should be 20% or 25%? I think most people would be content to leave such decisions to the government—what energy there presently is in the electoral system is that generated by the desire to screw your enemies, stamp their faces in the dust, and perform a victory dance over their corpses. If the enemy-generating machine is shut down, that energy will be sucked out of the system. (Even more serious issues, like social security reform, could be dealt with reasonably and calmly under these conditions.) A big test of the success of this model is whether Trump is able to, more or less explicitly, choose his successor: that itself would create an important precedent.

There’s an important consideration here regarding “public discourse.” If stopping the leak system is the lynchpin, we have to accept that much of what we see reported in the media, or even announced by Trump or others in his administration, will be falsehoods, deceptions and misdirections. We can’t expect to be told that a particular leaking official, whose “information” turns up on the front page of the New York Times, was given a “barium meal.” We must trust where we can’t verify. If Trump sees most of the media as the enemy of the American people, he obviously feels no obligation to be truthful with it or provide it with any information unhelpful to his own agenda; we therefore have no reason to believe, without substantial supplemental confirmation, anything coming from it. We have to set aside our own tendencies to hysteria: Sessions is really deep state! Trump has staffed his administration with enemies! Why doesn’t he fire Mueller/Rosenstein/Wray/whomever! Not only is there no point to worrying about things we have no power over, but we must eliminate our own bad democratic habits, one of which is to imagine that our elected officials are at our beck and call and must take all of our anger and resentment and fantasizing seriously. If we prefer the sovereignist agenda to anything else imaginable now, then we should inhabit and enact it ourselves by being good soldiers and assuming that Trump has things in hand—how can we become worthy of the most expansive understanding of his purposes? In large part by acting illiberally and undemocratically, i.e., like adults.

I would like to give credit where credit is due and also direct any readers to a unique and always interesting source of information and analysis by acknowledging the indebtedness of some of my speculations here to Thomas Wictor’s twitter feed.

Rene Girard’s take on the Passion is, on one level, desacralizing. The Gospel narrative of Christ’s persecution, torture, and execution reveals the perspective of the victim—the victim of sinful men acting as representatives of corrupt religious and political institutions. He didn’t deserve his crucifixion. We can see the “scapegoat mechanism” in action.

It’s ironic that Girard posits the scapegoat mechanism as the origin of our idea of god, and yet that the true God, when he came to earth, would be scapegoated and then deified. I don’t think Girard ever fully came to grips with this irony and its implications. He just regarded it as a profound mystery. But maybe there is a poetic meaning (I don’t say “justice”) in this irony.

For Girard, the Passion is the world historical event of events: revealing “things hidden since the foundation of the world.” Girard argues that our political structure and social order is based on sacrifice and/or scapegoating, in one form or another. The revelation of the truth of scapegoating upsets that structure and inaugurates a new age. The mimetic power of scapegoating and sacrifice is so powerful and mesmerizing that only God, in the person of the Son, could reveal its truth. So Girard reasserts true divinity, even as he demystifies the false sacred and false gods.

Girard’s interpretation contradicts traditional (substitutionary) theories of the Atonement, that “Christ died for our sins,” a theology that seems to assume a “vengeful” God who demands retribution, without any consideration of the guilt or innocence of the victim. In practice, Christians have evaded responsibility by blaming the Jews and Romans for Christ’s death.

For Girard, the Passion is a heuristic, in a radical sense: a revelation that makes continued scapegoating unconscionable. Of divine origin, but ultimately its meaning is rational and cognitive. So radical is the hidden truth of sacrificial religion (and related institutions) that it required the spectacular paradox of the God on the Cross to communicate its meaning. I understand that a theologian was able to convince Girard (after the publication of Things Hidden) that the substitutionary theory of the Atonement has some validity, but I’m not familiar with the argument, so I refrain from comment.

In any case, by demystifying “sacred” violence as human in origin, the Crucifixion confronts humans with their own violence, allowing them to recognize the true God, and seek salvation through faith. In this sense, Girard reaffirms the basic Christian message of repentance and faith.