Goebbels in America: The Microsolidarity of Identitarian Autohypnosis

19. IX 2021

Three quarters of a century after his death, Goebbels is back in vogue. After the 2020 shipwreck, Republicans are fighting for their lives. Desperate and pissed off, they are coming out as a full-blown Nazi party, taking Goebbels’ playbook as a gospel, pure and undiluted, as if no other books have ever been written. There are no more pretenses — anti-Semitism, racism, and misogyny are alive and well in America today with open support for white supremacy in all its modes and hasty legislation of outdated segregationist policies. MAGA-pride events, the culturally adjusted burlesque versions of Nazi conventions, have replaced country fairs and have become magnets for angry, aggressive, and comically stupid folks. New blood is being mobilized to carry out Brown-shirt activities and half-assed attempts to model their own martyrs (Ashli Babbitt as a modern day Horst Wessel) after Nazi folk heroes.

Without a program or agenda, and armed with strategy of fully randomized focus targeting, everything is in the mix (hoping that something will stick): The Constitution, first (and second) amendment, race (critical and uncritical), education, prayer in schools, American history (and anti-history), slavery, 1619, white replacement, immigration, misogyny, abortion, climate change, wealth distribution, student loans, taxes, recounts, voter suppression, insurrection, swastikas, sedition, civil war, Republican math, Florida man, flat earth, space travel, Taliban, Hunter Biden, media, influencers, Moonies, masks, vaccines, Fauci, Ivermectin, Jews with (and without) lasers, cousins in Trinidad, and, of course, Jesus.

By its design, the new, 21^st century gumbo of neo-Nazi propaganda has become the key identifier of growing masses of excluded, grotesquely ignorant folks whose anger and self-pity, caused by their precarity, trumps rationality, logic, science, and their own economic interests, safety and well-being. The high marketability of the Nazi-style response to populist rage is the new frontier for the transparently dishonest media outlets who, in search of attention, publicity, and ratings are willing to cross the boundaries of century-old social and political taboos and get on the other side in order to get ahead of the competition or just stay in the game.

A logical question emerges at this point: Why do we have to go back to these issues again? After all, these are outdated ideologies with a well-documented chronology of their inadequacy and chronic failure (social, economic, political, moral). Is fascism turning out to be the strange attractor of modernity and is its periodic recurrence unavoidable?

Despite its extreme nature and excesses, what happened in Germany in the 1930s was a logical inevitability of the Western civilization and its intellectual tradition. Evil is an intellectual need of the mind, which meditates about good. Intellectuals made evil logically necessary upon funding the idea about a better world. It is, therefore, no wonder that the origins of WWII reside in one of the most developed countries with the strongest cultural tradition in the Western world of that time.

After WWII was over, while the victors indulged in the narcissistic righteousness of its aftermath, Germany emerged richer with insights, which had remained unregistered by the allies. Through an unprecedented defeat, they [Germans] have been brought to the unwanted but valid insight that national identities and ethnic missions are in principle nothing more than violent and violence-producing collective autohypnosis. Consequently, they have developed a relationship to the missions of history that resembles that of a sober alcoholic to their former drug[1].

And while modern Germany has retreated from the manic historicity and forever abandoned the idea of being a chosen nation, the victors saw, and continue to see, WWII as just another round in a tournament for international supremacy in which one competitor (Germany) had been eliminated. They (the victors) never abandoned the dreams of their own supremacy — their individual or collective visions of the future have been nothing but projections and fantasies of their domination extending to their logical extremes[2].

America seems to have gone the furthest in that direction. Economically prosperous, but, at the same time, neck-deep in excrement, largely due to its own self-neglect and gross mismanagement of its fortunes, it remains narcissistically in love with itself (for all the wrong reasons). Paradoxically, this is especially true for those segments of the American population that have been the victims of said neglect. In the last years these folks have been in a state of a post-coital narcissistic orgy and have become a petri dish for the same collective auto-hypnotic identity politics and self-discovery that Germany went through a century ago.

By the end of the first decade of the new century, the gap that separates every disgruntled member of the excluded white sub-proletariat in America from the clutches of white supremacist rage has shrunk so much that it takes only a moment of inattention for any member of that community to falsely interpret their personal misery, deserved defeat, and bitterness as the sad faith of America, which, if we are to be honest, with such whining, pitiful and comically ignorant constituents, never really deserved anything better.

They failed in the game, which they invented, maintained, and defended at all cost, and now, they want another shot at it, but with altered rules, ones that would guarantee their advantage. This is the core of the microsolidarity and fractal belonging of the current identity politics. It is also fascism at its purest.

And as the saying goes: All comedies of history happen twice; the first time they are bloody, and the second time ridiculous. When the final receipts were written, the 1900s turned out to be a bad century for Germany. It was also a turning point for America as the leading cultural and economic global force. Now that baton has been passed, it is America’s turn. So, here we are.

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[1] Peter Sloterdijk, Infinite Mobilization, Polity Press (2020)

[2] ibid.

Texas

5. IX 2021

Identity code has a generally excluding effect capable of mobilizing negative energies and social forces towards those who do not share the same origin, territory or culture. Fascism is the fundamental obsession with identity, origin and belonging. It is a knee-jerk reaction to physical and social displacement. Fascism is generally absorbent, which reflects a fear of small numbers — it likes size because identity robustness had been eroded by the defection and depletion of ranks. It absorbs everyone willing to join in and expresses hostility to outsiders.

While there are many varieties of fascism, they all have one thing in common: Misogyny resides at the origin of each and every one of them – there hasn’t been a fascist movement without it. It’s never been too difficult to mobilize enough male solidarity when it comes to organized misogyny. By questioning the external norms that relate to the position of men and women in society, man has and had nothing to gain and everything to lose: he would lose not only social and economic advantages, but something far more precious, a sense of his own superiority which bolsters his ego both in his public and private life[1].

The fundamental cohesive force of fascism always begins with a male bonding ritual of masculinization of cultural self-perception. In Italy, for example, early 20^th century fascism represented the turning point from feminine self-perception to masculine assertiveness: Erasing feminine quality of its Mediterranean sensitivity – everything that makes life there pleasant and seductive — and affirming a different self-image based on acceleration and male potency (national pride, military aggressivity, industrial growth, etc). German fascism, on the other hand, was not a programmatic cultural defeminization, but rather an establishment of systematic downgrade of femininity to reproductive function as a part of the new nation-serving hierarchization. Its essence was a utilitarian placement of women as birth factories, their subordination to the interests of the National Socialist political agenda (run by men), to serve the numbers.

When seen in the context of the most recent developments, the new intensity of the American misogyny appears less of an anachronistic anomaly and more as a logical consequence of the current political struggles. The debates (and the present escalation) of the Abortion law – the topic that had been put to rest in the remainder of the world a long time ago – is resurfacing now, at this particular moment, not in the light of its renewed relevance or urgency, but as an opening act for the new chapter of fascism. It is showing here in a more convoluted way than it had 100 years ago because the social and cultural displacement of the 21^st century Western man has triggered new modes of identity politics.

Modern day misogyny is the ultimate male fantasy of the Western conservatives structured around a nostalgia for the times of lower entropy, a return to the past as a site of coherence, and a relapse to the patriarchal setting when man held their “naturally deserved” upper hand and (a male) God ruled the world. Through misogyny this man articulates the desire to reclaim what he considers his “natural right” to control women and, in that way, take control of his own destiny.

Conservative man’s vision of woman is not objective, but an uneasy combination of what he wishes her to be and what he fears her to be[2]. The masculinization program and return to patriarchal values (the most coveted axiom of any right-wing politics) and assault on women’s rights and their position in society, if they are to be successful, would have to be deeper, gradual, and systematic. This means undoing the women’s emancipation. The tactical approach of conservative politics is that the masculinization program requires a proper framing and subtle maneuvering — women must not be antagonized; they are many and they vote. In their view, the most effective approach is to strike at the root of a woman’s influence.

No one has more influence on a person during their formative age than their mother. As such, she is a constant threat to both the state and to men in general. The decision of life and death has to be taken away from women. Their influence and importance in the life of their children have to be diminished, if not de facto, then, at least, symbolically. Right to life! This is ultimately the question about who has jurisdiction over the life of an individual, their mother/family or the state (ruled by men, of course). With the help of proper framing, this becomes the theme that defines the core of conservative identity politics, an issue slowly hijacked by (predominantly white) men who feel righteous and entitled, and present themselves as defenders of human life while women take a back seat.

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[1] Eva Figes, Patriarchal Attitudes, Persea Books (1986)

[2] ibid.

Fatal Strategies and the Value of Human Life

20. VI 2021

Civilization’s potential for barbarism is growing; the everyday bestialization of man is on the increase. (Peter Sloterdijk)

In the autumn of 1914, a human life was infinitely more worthless than in the autumn of 1913. WWI was an abyss, a near-unfathomable crisis of civilization, and one of the most important issues that needed to be addressed in its wake was precisely the worth of the human being[1].

This question would set the tone and meter of the political discourse to come, its echo extending beyond the remainder of the 20^th century, without ever losing its relevance. It would only assume different forms and granularity as its context changed, its mutation continuously adapting to different modes of fascism and identity politics, which defined the metrics for the relative valuation of human life.

Before and during WWII, it was the value of Arian vs. non-Arian lives (fascism). In occupied territories in WWII, Germany had a simple algorithm, precise and unambiguous, displayed in public for everyone to know: For each German killed, they would execute 100 randomly picked locals. In the second part of the 20^th century, which Immanuel Wallerstein had coined as the realization of democratic fascism[2] whereby 20% of the global population exploits the remaining 80%, the debate shifted to the relative worth of American vs. non-American lives. In backlash to western hegemony, the Islamic dilemma was articulated through Islamo-fascism and terrorism with the discourse defined by a different valuation of Muslim and infidel lives. With the gradual normalization of neo-fascism and white supremacy in the new century, the debate shifted (back) to white vs. non-white and natives vs. migrants.

In today’s America, this problem is currently struck around quantifying the value of Black lives. It is not an entirely new debate, but the socio-political backdrop is. The narrative behind the current ritual of white supremacist coming out and their clownish uprising rests on the belief that, contrary to the overwhelming evidence, Black lives are valued fairly, if not even overvalued. Persistent and deliberate police brutality against Black people is but a particular way of transmitting this message, and so is the normalization of white supremacy with white replacement paranoia, the glorification of slavery, voter suppression, the exorcism of critical race theory from the school curriculum, and general revisionism.

Delirium

The embrace of a regressive revival of racial tensions defines the delirium of the current socio-political counterpoint. It is a moment that desperately demands collective introspection. Here, we have to be careful to avoid the trappings of conventional (Freudian) psychoanalysis defined relative to an Oedipal axis (which locates the roots of our problems in sex and family). What is currently at play requires a different perspective, defined by Deluze and Guatarri as anti-Oedipal:

The real problem of delirium lies in the extraordinary transition from the pole of reactionary or fascist to a revolutionary pole. Statements like ‘I belong to a superior race’ appear in all paranoid deliriums. Similarly, ‘I belong to an utterly inferior race’ is a revolutionary pole of madness[3].

The excluded white precariat is torn between these two poles, unable to decide where they stand or belong, and where they want to be. They have managed to lose their way in the interstices of the anti-Oedipal perspective. The decades of erosive acrobatics of ideological maneuvering have made this point especially ambiguous in a way that, although neither one is correct, both appear equally plausible and seductive.

Trapped in what Wendy Brown considers the neoliberal trauma inflicted by neoliberalism’s accidental wounding of the white male supremacy[4], the white underclass remains transfixed between a self-pity of collective victimology and an unwavering sense of superiority and entitlement, all these emotions grossly misinterpreted, misdirected and manipulated, standing as a testament to their anachronism.

This ideological terrain had been already claimed and appropriated by the conservative Right, resurrected as the Right Wing populism, which has latched onto the underlying white discontent as their lifeline and the last point of rescue from their own obsolescence. In a bizarre symbiosis between the super-privileged and the super-marginalized segments of the white American population, conservative leaders have taken upon themselves the role of speaking on behalf of the poor so that the poor wouldn’t speak for themselves: We want to include you in the decision without letting you influence it. Through carefully structured narratives and divisive memes, their rhetorics are framed as a culture war, which insures that the underlying rage capital of the white precariat remains properly invested and its supply never stops growing.

Entropy

The current crisis of politics is unlike anything seen before. It hasn’t been brought about by chronic scarcity, economic devastation or depression. It has been driven by an undeniable realization that exploding wealth and prosperity has repeatedly failed to underwrite a decent, or even acceptable, life for a growing majority of people amidst the unrestrained accumulation of wealth of a shrinking minority.

Entropy cannot decline, it must rise – systems always evolve towards less orderly state. This means that order always comes at a price: Local order can happen so long as it ejects enough disorder to its surroundings that the total disorder raises. Peaceful social life means that one party, the ruling one, has already won. Interfering with that – taking over by another political faction – creates an upheaval and disruption of peace.

Exploding inequality, which comes about when extreme prosperity is financed by extreme exclusion, eventually tips the scale and leads to a buildup of latent systematic violence that does not know, and is incapable of acknowledging the existence of, any bounds. At some point, this latent violence begins to permeate every aspect of social and political life and along the way creates the state of the general exclusion principle: [Y]ou cannot calculate both the current [social] position of an individual and his or her velocity of exclusion, [e.g.] advancement of women and their virtual downgrading[5]. It is impossible to distinguish causes and effects or to isolate subject from object (are Republicans hostages of their base or is the base their victims). One can grasp either the appearance or the meaning, but not both at the same time (we cannot tell whether GOP politicians only act as morons or they are actual morons). Ultimately, we can no longer calculate the price of a human life and its statistical value at the same time[6].

Nihilism of value and the fight for human soul

How did we get here? What is the big loss and trauma humanity had experienced that has led to this nihilism of value, which the neoliberal mutation of capitalism only made intolerable?

In the past, the human being was not doomed to be merely what he is. God and Satan wrestled over him. In the past, we were important enough to have a battle fought over our soul. Today, our salvation is our own affair. Our lives are no longer marked by original sin but by the risk of failing to fulfill our ultimate potential. So we accumulate plans, ideas and programs; we constantly pass the buck and seek to outdo each other in a universal effort to perform[7].

By attempting to achieve local order in our lives we eject disorder elsewhere. And as everyone does the same thing, this creates entropy, which continues to grow unstoppably and, as much as we try to avoid it, entropy begins to seep into all pores of everyone’s life. But whom do we turn to when we fail (and an increasing fraction of American population is failing), or whom do we blame for our failure?

In the absence of transcendent powers watching over us, and in the perpetual effort to validate our existence, we are forced to become ‘fatal’ to ourselves[8]. We romanticize the past and revive its ghosts in order to create a context for the struggle about jurisdiction over the ancestral terrain, its location and boundaries, and the right to map the current reality onto it. This is the only way of bringing back the lost meaning of human life. We need to own the future in order to conquer the past, because this is the terrain on which the battle for our souls will be fought again.

In what becomes a parody of fate, a leader figure will emerge who will fill that empty place and fight for the excluded and forgotten. And when they find each other, the excluded and forgotten followers will ignore every and all of his shortcomings — no matter how flawed he might be, they will support him unconditionally. He might be the worst human being there is, but they don’t require goodness or humanity from him because he fights for their soul. Nothing else will matter anymore.

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[1] Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle Book 6, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2019)

[2] Immanuel Wallerstein, World Systems Analysis: An Introduction, Duke University Press (2004)

[3] Felix Guattari, Chaosophy, Semiotext(e), New edition (2008)

[4] Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West, Columbia University Press (2019)

[5] Jean Baudrillard, Impossible Exchange, Verso; Reprint edition (2012)

[6] ibid.

[7] ibid.

[8] ibid.

Identity crises and four modes of misogyny

24. XII 2017

When it came to political revolution against an autocracy only a privileged minority had something to gain by resisting the forces of change, but in changing the relationship of men to women every man, rich or poor, stands to lose by a change.[1]

Identity code has a generally excluding effect capable of mobilizing negative energies and social forces towards those who do not share the same origin, territory and/or cultural code. One of Franco Berardi’s persistent themes has been the idea that deterritorialization results in a disconnect of people from their identity code. Movements of reterritorialization are always manifested through rituals of aggressive re-identification (e.g. violence, racism, war,…). Fascism is the fundamental obsession with identity, origin and belonging (and recognizability). It is generally inclusive, which reflects a fear of small numbers — it likes size because identity robustness had been eroded by the defection and erosion of ranks. Fascism absorbs everyone willing to join in and expresses hostility to outsiders – burning bridges reinforces commitment to the identity[2].

Every response to identity crisis, every identitarian fantasy and obsession is accompanied with a distinct mode of misogyny. There are four main modes of misogyny that relate to the underlying types of identity loss: Traditional patriarchal, Italian fascist, National socialist, and American.

Patriarchal setting: Linear misogyny

There is a relatively narrow spectrum here. All patriarchal structures have a certain degree of hostility towards women; they only differ by mode and intensity. The hostility is particularly palpable in monotheistic religions, which carry strong overtones of repressed (male) homosexuality. In that particular aspect, radical Islam goes further than other religions which show more restraint and apparent tolerance. The quarrels between Islam and Western conservative Christian societies when it comes to the position of women is only about the mode and extent of repression: How much freedom should women have and how explicit the boundaries should be; should women not be allowed to work at all or should they only be paid less than men for their work[3].

This is the world where there is no place for a woman outside of her reproductive role. However, men are expected to couple with women – they must perform their reproductive community service – which they do, often against their desires. Muslim women are removed from men’s sight by being forced to cover their faces and bodies – men don’t want to be reminded of their existence. Hassidic Jewish communities, on the other hand, have a somewhat subtler approach. Their women are all forced to wear identical wigs and clothes, to have the same appearance. They become “invisible” by being indistinguishable. Any sign of distinction or sexuality is inhibited. Physical contact is purely for reproductive purpose, stripped of sexual connotation as much as possible and minimized direct contact. The hostility is supported by sustained subliminal narrative of their impurity, the fear of menstruation and need for special cleansing rituals in those days.

Defeminization of society: Italian fascism

Although women are intrinsically linked to man’s mobility, their deserving role in that department has been lost with time thanks to persistent development of elaborate institutions of women’s repression. Velocity and acceleration became synonymous with the modern tools of male potency. Franco Berardi gives an insider’s perspective on how this trend created fertile ground for both fascism and misogyny in Italy: One cannot understand Italian fascism if one does not start from the need for defeminization of cultural self-perception. Italians have always regarded themselves from a feminine perspective. The greatness of Italian culture is its femininity, Mediterranean sweetness, taste for life, tenderness, and slowness[4].

Towards mid-19^th century, Italian national culture became ashamed of its peaceful femininity and began inoculating itself with testosterone. Fascism in Italy represents the turning point from feminine self-perception to masculine assertiveness. It is defined by a need for erasing feminine self-perception together with its Mediterranean sensitivity, and affirming a different self-image based on acceleration. National pride, military aggressivity, industrial growth, etc. was all fake and artificial; this is why Italian fascism is often perceived as a farce. The result was a ridiculous display of machismo perfectly embodied by such clowns as Mussolini and Berlusconi[5].

Subordination to higher cause: National Socialism

Unlike Italian fascism (or Islamofascism for that matter), which is inclusive, National Socialism is based on the denial of humanity to the Other — it has clearly defined boundaries and highly restrictive admission rules, accessible only to the chosen. Like any other identitarian movement, it likes size (and large numbers), but it has a different plan for achieving those goals, by growing from within. This is where women come in.

German fascism was not a programmatic cultural defeminization, but rather an establishment of systematic downgrade of femininity to reproductive function as a part of the new nation serving hierarchization. Its essence was a utilitarian placement of women as birth factories, their subordination to the interests of the National Socialist political agenda, to serve the numbers.

This produced a nationwide program for the advancement of national health and racial purity, and general physical and mental fitness, the eroticization of masculinity personified by soldiers, and women’s subordinate role in that context. While these attributes had never gone out of vogue completely, their systematization had never reached the same proportions as in Germany during the 1930s.

Although this program was short lived and with tragic consequences, remnants of the institutions of women’s repression and exclusion lingered on for the remainder of the 20th century. Until well into the 1990’s all shops, including food, operated on stubbornly inflexible schedules incompatible with the idea of working mothers, all closing by 6pm on weekdays, and 2pm on Saturdays (closed on Sundays). All this in a Germany that was rebuilding at an accelerated pace and notoriously lacking a labor force, needing to import a large contingent of foreign workers to fill that gap. It took enormous effort and a long time to “modernize” and adapt it to contemporary standards where working women and fully functional families became compatible with each other.

Decomplexified femininity and nostalgia for idiot housewives: American misogyny

Man’s vision of woman is not objective, but an uneasy combination of what he wishes her to be and what he fears her to be. (Eva Figes)

American-style misogyny and the underlying identity crisis behind it is effectively a composite of the three previous examples, enhanced with additional layers of an ideological mindfuck, required to tackle complexities that developed during the late stages of neoliberalism. While 21^st century America has incorporated new advances in communications and media techniques into all aspects of social and political life, in many ways it is still struggling to shake off backwards-patriarchal attitudes and its inability to fully embrace the social emancipation consistent with modernity.

In the decades of all-inclusive and all-permissive (ethnic, racial, gender, and cultural) neoliberalism the masculine core of American culture, its male assertiveness, aggressivity, and impulsiveness, had been diluted. The essence of America was emasculated, its survival threatened.

White American males have always been in charge. They made the rules and they called the shots in the workplace, in the home and at the ballot box. They’ve owned the world for so long and have been getting increasingly uncomfortable as their grip on power had been eroding. Now the unthinkable is happening: They are becoming the minority. For the first time more minority babies were born than white babies (it is damn numbers again)! And a black president has served two terms, his Secretary of State was a woman, the most educated segment of the society are black women, and every other daytime talk show or news anchor is gay. This is what conservatives are really upset about. Suddenly this country is way off the main path; the whole system needs to be restored and some reset buttons need to be pushed.

The problem requires a systematic approach. Restoring order means the resolute masculinization of society (of course). This should start by arming men with weapons – the more lethal, the more masculine they are – establishing male supremacy values (this has worked since the Stone Age, and it should continue to work in the 21^st century as well) and establishing a fear of god — this helps the male cause because god is a dude (white, of course).

As a part of the masculinization program and return of patriarchal values, assault on women’s rights and their position in society must be thorough and systematic – women’s emancipation has to be undone. However, this part requires a subtle approach and proper framing — women must not be antagonized; they are many and they vote. The most effective way is to strike at the root of a woman’s influence.

No one has more influence on a person during his/her formative age than their mother. As such, she is a constant threat to both the state and to men in general. The decision of life and death has to be taken away from women. Their influence and importance in the life of their children have to be diminished, if not de facto, then at least symbolically. Right to life! This is ultimately the question about who has jurisdiction over the life of an individual, their mother/family or the state. With the help of proper framing, this becomes the theme that defines the core of the right wing identity, an issue slowly hijacked by (predominantly white) men. They have the view, they feel righteous and they present themselves as defenders of human life while women take a back seat.

Decomplexified femininity

Feminism is here to stay, so it has to be incorporated into the new model of woman. Femininity needs to be redefined and decomplexified. The latest right wing assault on women’s emancipation process was the introduction of the MILFs of the new rank[6] into political life. There are two essential groups. Sarah Palin, NRA women Dana Loesch, Michelle Buchman, Omarosa… are typical representatives of the first kind. These women impassion America, they bring a new Eros to politics. They embody “post-feminist” femininity without a complex, uniting the features of mother, teacher (glasses, hair in a bun), public person, and, implicitly, sex object, and, with a dash of their oversexed vulgarity, reinforce the existing cultural boundaries. The message is that they “have it all” — and that, to add insult to injury, these are Republican women who, in some metric, had realized the left-liberal dream.

The second kind, the lower echelon, like Jane Porter, Roy Moore’s wife, Sarah Hucka-San, Katrina Pearson, have a slightly different appeal: Their trailer park pedigree and manifest lack of interest for any semblance of intellectual integrity and sophistication are paraded and advertised as an integral part of the entire value system. These are the women who perfectly fit the backwards patriarchal model, with a dash of modernity. Their little secret is that their popularity comes predominantly from white men. All others – minorities, women, democrats, non-white men — hate them. Only white men like them. These women represent something those men miss dearly: The traditional idiot housewife.[7]

As the ranks of the successful and prosperous are shirking in the face of rampant inequality, the number of those that are left behind and can no longer be reintegrated into the society swells. The numbers are there, they just have to be bundled together under one umbrella. The two opposite sides, super rich and poor, have to be united despite conflicting interests. And so, the need for the eroticization of stupidity grows, as the existing ideology becomes increasingly more difficult to sell. Without a functioning liberal class, the anger among the working and the middle class is being expressed in ideologies that detest democratic institutions and the civilities of a liberal democracy. The right wing populist narrative gains traction and with new constituents gradually finds its way to the ballot box. White trash becomes fully engaged in their dual role as booth the victims and their own executioners.

Rage capital is ready for picking. It is harvest time.

[1] John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women, Penguin Classics (2007)

[2] Franco Berardi, Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide, Verso (2015)

[3] A particularly sharp treatment of the subject dealing with proximity of the conservative Christian and radical Islamic worldviews can be found in Michel Houllebecq, Submission, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2015)

[4] Franco Berardi, After the Future, AK Press (2011)

[5] Franco Berardi, ibid.

[6] Jacques-Alain Miller, Sarah Palin: Operation “Castration”, in Lacan dot com (2008)

[7] Jacques-Alain Miller, ibid.