The shithead won

 The Dems win all the wrong elections. If Clinton had lost in 1992, we'd have a much better Democratic party. If Biden had lost in 2020, the shithead would be heading out the door. And what in my life would have been worse if the shithead had his second term then? Cannot think of much. Abortion rights lost? Check. Corruption on the Supreme Court allowed to flourish? Check. Gazan systematically murdered in an American abetted genocide? Check.

Still, I voted for KH cause she was young, comparatively, wasn't the Shithead or Biden, and I thought in the end she'd be better in the Middle East.

The Dems ran, once again, as the respectability party. What this means in the neolib era is combining a vague Civil Rights culture with untrammeled plutocracy and financial capitalism. It is a mix that leads to wider and wider wobbles in our politics.

Summing up the Biden disfunction was the popularity of explaining economic discontent with the term vibes. The people only think they know what economics is - it has to be explained to them they never had it so good! That is a joke. Coming off of the COVID interregnum, people got a taste of a truly extended social security net. Money from the gov! That was rolled up, and inflation hit seriously, and where was the Biden people? Well, they were on tv, explaining that we never had it so good. 

In a final twist to the whole false synthesis of neolib economics and civil rights culture, we get it explained that economic malaise vibes is really an excuse for racism. Which I suppose explains the Shithead's success with black voters. Or doesn't. Guess which households have been hit worst by "vibes" -- if you guessed black households, you'd be right. 

Next four years of Shithead being in everyone's mouths makes me tired. I'm tired and old. I want to do something else.

I'll add this, from June. Back then, it was France, but the same system dynamic is at play in the U.S. I have been searching for a term to encompass one of the great features of capitalism – the non-necessary synthesis. I guess I will call it the mock synthesis.

A mock, or synthetic synthesis is the repeated putting together of two sets of concepts that are not necessarily joined together, creating a “discursive” necessity – or what I would call a mock necessity.

The third way, that ghostly nineties thing, corresponds very well to the synthetic synthesis model. A certain neo-classical economics is retrieved from the conservative opposition to social democracy, and is synthesized with an ideology that came out of the class struggles that brought about social democracy: that is, the struggle for civil rights of oppressed subjects in a liberal nation-state. So, for instance, the type of economic policies that favous a great increase in economic inequality, with its deregulation, its guarantees of support for the financial sector, its lower tax rate for the wealthy (in all its parts, including the blind eye turned to offshore money and the whole system of tax avoidance for the wealthy) is joined to an increasing concern with the legal equality of the oppressed subjects.

In the synthetic synthesis, the former left assumption – that class struggle is the shaping force of capitalist modernity – is simply dropped out.

Synthetic synthesis produces a certain type of managerial self. In corporations, in academia, in politics, in journalism this self is encountered over and over again. It is a self that is rhetorically virtuous, but anchored in every way in an economics of exploitation. The synthetic progressive.

That these syntheses are not grounded in necessity – that is, in any approximation of a total view of society – means that these managerial selves can easily adopt attitudes that go violently against the civil rights ideology that legitimates them.

In France, right now, we are seeing in real time how this works, as Macron – an almost ideal managerial self – and the National Front (the RN, but I’m going to refuse to call them their new audience friendly name) are tentatively reaching out to each other. Last year, Le Pen’s party joined the left in its criticism of Macron’s reactionary attacks on Social Democratic institutions, symbolized by the fight over retirement. Symbolized, I should say, by the theft, by the political establishment, of years of the life of the employed classes, from clerks to mid-level managers to every employee of every public service. The last named have long been the target of Macronist contempt, contempt at the deepest level.

On the way to assuming power, the National Front, much like some Marxist caricature of fascism, erased its dispute with Macron over economics. And, indeed, in the turning of these wheels, the fragility of the synthetic synthesis comes into full view: why not attack social democracy and promote racism? It is as necessary, or non-necessary, as its opposite.

One of the great terms that has arisen in the social media is “gaslighting” – and gaslighting is symptomatic in late neoliberalism of the grinding sound at the base, as the money that flowed into the plutocracy due to neoliberal policies starts flowing to the reactionaries and fascists. The billionaire philanthropists, it turns out, are billionaires first, and philanthropists only as it gains them power and tax breaks.

It is hard to get one’s mind around a society that has so amply and fully adopted to synthetic syntheses – as it makes the life-world seem, ultimately, a sort of petty game, where nothing is serious if you don’t have serious money. Democracy can be cast aside because it empowers “non-serious” people. The serious buy their seriousness with serious money.