Transparent Politics – CounterPunch.org

Although I find much in American politics today transparent, and so there for all to see, our vicious divide refutes this. We are now at a level in which facts and evidence are personal valuations and so while it’s transparent to me that Donald J. Trump is the worst, being the most dangerous to our electoral Constitutional democracy, in U.S history, some 25 to 27% of all Americans identify as MAGA, devoted supporters of whatever they think Trump is doing, about 85 million Americans. Thus, for these readers what I describe as transparent is the reverse of what is really the case. We are in a kind of pataphysical reality in which, as Rene Daumal writes, we see and think in “vicious circles that bring the human spirit to a limit-state of stupor & scandal.”

 According to postmodern theory, which I wrote and lectured on for many years, we don’t see through but filter and mediate what we see from within our life-worlds. The lens of seeing is cultural, broadly historical or not; the human sciences not able to escape; the natural sciences upholding a methodology aiming to do so. Thus, for me, Donald J. Trump’s unruly, mad charge straight through not only the norms and procedures of politics but also the norms of reason and sanity has been an Emperor has no clothes shout out. Not only has our democratic “Founding Father Foundations” and our Western tradition of rational order so far failed to shut this guy up but his iconoclasm has brought him a following. In other words, he’s trashed “real facts” and he’s gotten a winning number of Americans to go along with him although he’s clearly the “shitty bugger” Ubu Roi Alfred Jarry thought would be the man in authority of the future.

I’ve written “Transparent Politics” not on behalf of an Enlightenment order, pretending  as if I had no lens through which I see, but because I resist tolerating in any way the vicious circles this shitty bugger’s mind has assailed us with, the stupor and scandal state of the U.S now. 

Within this context so twisted and darkened, so disclosing of its own remove from everything but one man’s mind, what is transparent would appear to be not a difficult case to make. However, it has proven very difficult. Those who use a balance sheet of debits and credits have clearly seen greater benefit in sticking with our mad Ubu Roi than not. Portfolios here rather experience the presidency of a man who is transparently mad than face the threats of a Democratic Party order.  Conditions change at a fast pace. While the threats of a DSA led party increase, the corrupt licensing of a President Trump is at End of Sale stage. The rush is on to grab and run before the Dems spoil the festivities. With those licensed by Trump to join  him in the pillage, it was never a matter of not understanding the dangers presented to the democratic order of things. Profit making is here both life and the pursuit of happiness. How tied is a globalized, financialized capitalism to the order of an electoral, liberal democracy as opposed to any order in which business can be done without fear of nationalization or loss of military protection?

One of the vicious circles we are twirling within right now is nervous making for oligarchs feeding off Trump: As he breaks down before our eyes, the order necessary to do business is collapsing. By the time the Democrats have enough Congressional power to go after Trump’s corrupt order, Republicans will find it beneficial to their interests to go along with impeachment conviction. Shaking him off will be like private equity destroying for quick gain what they had bought into. During the aberrant period before this happens, some rats will jump ship, some rats will hang onto the cheese as long as they can, some rats will write Apologia and become Catholic, and maybe some rats will go to jail. If Trump doesn’t die or go to jail, he’ll go to Mar a Lago, write Truth Social diatribes and greet loyal MAGA devotees.

If as I premise the politics of these Trump years are transparent, what tied the MAGAs to Mad Trump? Obviously, for them no attack on Trump is transparently valid. What words mean is what Humpty Dumpty Trump says they mean. Although anything opposing Trump’s dicta can never be either transparently clear or evidentiarily clear, what is also not clear is whether or not any thought lies behind the fear, anger and hatred that keep MAGA alive. Trump is the fuel source here averaging 20 posts a day on Truth Social. A very psychiatrically telling title created by a man with a sociopathic disinterest in society and a man who tells two lies per minute. What seems clear here is that with Trump gone, MAGA, united only in fear, anger and hate without rational substance, will wither and die, as the Tea Party did. 

West Coast Tech Bros whose politics is as ready-to-hand as AI and robotics –meaning, there is no transparency here – apparently see themselves as above or at best disinterested in democratic, Constitutional order, Trump’s corrupt order and anything going on politically, socially, economically before AI. If this turns out to be tycoon boom creating, political thought will soon follow the money. Whether it’s anti-liberal/anti-democratic/illiberal leading to a kind of Huxley Brave New World or something as dystopic as our many post-apocalyptic moves portray is a question for Claude or ChatGPT and Gemini to answer.

II

Whether Trump’s transparent grifting and extortion, and a really transparent fuck all view of his fellow humans, pushes the American Mass Psyche once again to a Democrat sop and salve president in 2028 depends on whether that party can see what’s transparently before them.

By the time the November Congressional elections roll around – less than 90 days – we can expect, if Trump holds course, both the House and the Senate will be handed to Democrats. What is Trump’s course? A damaging one, damaging to all including himself. The American Mass Psyche will be in dire need of regenerating its Exceptional/Stellar image of itself. This is not simply getting behind a Talerico Good Guy. What’s needed is a Reagan Good Guy — without the Trickle Down — charismatic communicator even though he capsized a middle class democracy and led the country to oligarchy.  Neither Clinton nor Obama leaned into the wage earner more than to the dividend recipient, both presidencies captured by the Too Big to Fail stature of globalized, financialized capitalism. But as the DNC was also so captured and remains so, a winning charisma will be valued more highly than a re-distributive politics taunting the Leviathan of not Big Government but Finance.

What rough beast in the Democratic Party is stumbling toward the 2028 election to be born? What percentage of this party wants to play Woke and DEI again? What percentage of this party wants to take up the DSA and hope to bring to national scale what Mamdani did in NYC? 

I think it’s transparent that neither DEI or DSA will become a Democratic Party platform. The first because it clearly led to Trump’s victory in 2024, a victory fueled on what Democrats felt was their raison d’etre. Too adapted to leaning on the boast, bloat and bullshit of how the rich defined growth, the DNC rejected the socialism of Bernie, a socialism that Mamdani won on years later. 

It seems that what Woke and DEI meant and how it impacted the American Mass Psyche was always clear. A white, Christian, heterosexual, English language, family values unity did not welcome colored, not Christian, foreign speaking, single parent, LGBTQ, immigrant flock. No ambiguity as to what was not liked or wanted. 

Why the Democratic Party gave itself so fully to what so many voters didn’t like and didn’t want is our first non-transparent matter. Why a desertion of economic matters when a couple of dozen families had as much wealth as the bottom 50% of the population? Ignoring this was not a way to win a national election or even a mosh pit battle on social media. Left without any will, except for a few dissenters, to stand behind a distributive economics, Democrats pitched their tent on the cultural warfare front. Like Custer, they were overrun. Fixing the wealth divide would have done much to disappear the Us/Them psychosis. 

It’s not the particular actions Mamdani takes toward affordability for NYC wage earners that will go to scale nationally, although if his successes shout down shouts of failure on social media, Mamdani and not his socialism may be the instrument to win national election. Democratic socialism will not gain entrance to the American Mass Psyche in any election winning way until its long-time negative branding is erased and replaced positively. Although DSA’s present membership of 120,000 makes it the largest socialist organization in the U.S., there is no transparency as to what contentious issues will lead to a declaration of independence from the Democratic Party.

 In an interview with Jon Stewart, Mamdani skillfully detoured around Stewart’s questioning as to what his socialism entailed in terms of a critique of capitalism. Mamdani wouldn’t theorize but stayed fixed to the problems. Recently, in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed has won the Michigan Senate primary, careful not to label himself a Democratic Socialist and instead, like Mamdani, has focused on issues of affordability. Affordability challenges in many areas have been Mamdani’s work. If he succeeded with housing, health care, free child care, city run groceries, free busing, rental control and so on, the economic approach would be carried along to success. Socialism would come to mean improved life for the wage earners.

 The Republican Party post-Trump is in an even less transparent fix than the Democratic Party. Surely some will seek a Trump-clone and others will seek a Not Trump. The fortunes of Marco Rubio and JD Vance will depend on how Trump goes out: sainted, or just dead and bad like MAGA. Both Rubio and Vance have made their opportunism transparent to all. Both are ready to eulogize the dead Trump and promise to be just like him, or, rip into the man and promise a return to normal Republicanism, which in the United States of Amnesia is not known. 

What does seem clear is that the Democrats will give any Republican candidate enough fuel for attack, Communist and Antisemitic labels replacing Woke and DEI. The proposed changes advocated by the DSA seem provoking and not clearly tied to the basic socialist tenet of economic equality, not a State command of such but a legislative striving toward such, a distributive economics not stochastically ruled, which is the present situation. None of this is as clearly enunciated by the DSA as needed. 

Perhaps DSA could become strong enough to take money off the speech list and corporations off the person list. That would have to be done when AI is poised to put astronomical wealth in the portfolios of investors and shareholders. The owners of these different  machines become the new oligarchs. And these are not the Democratic Party’s peeps nor will they be welcoming socialism.