Buckle Up, Comrades. It’s About To Get Weird.

There has been no shortage of declarative thinkpieces about the event taking place today in Washington, DC. I won’t pretend to be writing a similar one, because everything that could possibly said seems to have already been said. I’ve decided to take a week-long hiatus from Facebook to see what else I can do with my time– not that Zuckerberg particularly cares about the pennies in ad revenue I might be sending his way during this time, but I figure the gesture is perhaps less meaningful than the experiment in seeing if it improves my productivity (or mental health or what have you). But I do want to spend a little bit of time thinking about how to engage in the inevitable weirdness of the coming months. Or year. Shuddering a bit as I think about this.

Anyway, it’s also extremely cold in Lansing right now– all of single digits at the moment, and that’s Fahrenheit for those of ye in the Land of the Rising Timbit- and we’re supposed to see lows below zero into Wednesday. Fantastic! In any case, this means it’s actually too cold for me to walk the doggos around the neighborhood, so we’re sort of holed up in the house getting life organized (and I my syllabi– yes, I know the semester is already started!).

Some things I’m thinking about today:

The DOGE Days of Winter

A colleague texted me a link to this news item about how activists are already prepared to file a legal challenge to the legitimacy of DOGE, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, which philandering drug addict Elon Musk, scam artist Vivek Ramaswamy, and That Other Guy (יִמַּח שְׁמוֹ) propped up as a solution to reduce the federal budget. It is less smoke and mirrors and more just bluster and bullshit, of course– but it’s also arguably unconstitutional. And not the way conservative activists tried to argue the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was unconstitutional– unsuccessfully, in that case.

Whether related to DOGE or anything else, though, as a Skeeter pointed out, the question is less whether the new president is legally allowed to do this or that, but whether the arch-conservative judiciary will allow him to. I’m a big fan of using plain language to describe things, which is why I describe the president as a fascist. But I also believe that there are even conservative judges in the judiciary who aren’t quite sold on the idea of a fascist autocracy. So, we’ll see. The Fifth Circuit is a big question mark because of how far to the right it has moved in the past few decades (thanks, Ronny!).

 

The Already-Unraveling Administration?

I wrote about this a bit at the start of the new year, but it seems as though the previous cracks haven’t exactly healed. Consternation has already abounded at the release of a new cryptocurrency by the now-returning president, followed by the release of a Melania-themed cryptocurrency, and at Elon Musk’s apparent use of a Nazi salute in an address after the inauguration. As of writing this, the president’s coin has lost about 50% of its value since it peaked, and 12% in the past 24 hours alone. It’s not clear whether he will, during his revenge tour of white supremacist revanchism, actually disclose how much money he’s making from selling his own positions.

I had given the new administration until the spring of 2025 until there was some major blow-up between the hard-right and the Silicon Valley techno-fascists, but we’ve already seen Steve Bannon and Laura Loomer shooting off about Elon Musk. Vivek Ramaswamy has already been booted out from DOGE– and that’s just an announcement from the evening of the first day of the new presidency! So, we’ll see what else.

The Impending, Maybe Completely Contrived, Threat of Disaster

To a normal human who thinks about, say, the prosperity of the human race being measured by the prosperity of every member of the human race, one of the most frustrating things about the United States might well be that we measure our country’s prosperity and stability in terms of the strength of the consumer economy. This is not just in terms of measuring economic health using things like consumer spending as an individual category, but it’s also in terms of how we define the health of the economy almost exclusively in terms of things like consumer sentiment or growth in quarterly earnings numbers, or whatever.

But indeed, awful though this is, this may well be the thing that saves the next four years. Truly destructive action from the American president would, at some point, tank the economy. Surely, his own administration knows this. Distraction is a valuable tool if you’re trying to stage a fascist takeover of government, if we recall events like the Reichstag Fire.

But what’s perhaps less valuable in facilitating that end is if you blow up the economy in the process.

So, in other words, let’s not get distracted. The time for righteous indignation about the violation of etiquette and the flagrant disregard for basic human decency was over eight or nine years ago (can’t believe it’s been that long, and I’m kind of appalled that I’m typing out those very words). The time has remained for us to remain vigilant, take care of each other, and stay focused on the things we have to get done– to build a more equitable, more sustainable society, with or without the goofballs in the White House.

This means fighting against Big Tech– folks who seem to have ingratiated themselves with the president to the point that they were actually seated in front of the president’s proposed cabinet members in the Capitol today (the inauguration was indoors because of extremely cold weather, and/or someone being paranoid that someone might take a shot and not miss this time). This begins with at least attempting to cut off Amazon, Facebook, and, certainly, Tesla. (I’m not sure what we’re going to be able to do about Microsoft, Google, and Apple).

And this continues with working to support our local communities and the institutions that strengthen them– beginning with independent media as well as local and regional newspapers. Democracy dies in darkness, and it’s important for us to maintain vigilance by utilizing trustworthy institutions– a list that sadly might now have to exclude the Washington Post. Supporting your local community also demands that we stay vigilant about the goings-on with respect to proposed ICE raids, the first of which have reportedly already been postponed.

And as we think about whether the next four years mark some existential battle of democracy, or some sort of accelerationist swan song sung as a paean to neoliberal capitalism, I’d finally implore us all to think about whatever we can do to build the world we want to see, regardless of where it falls in that complicated spectrum. There’s this banger of a quote from Martin Luther King, Jr. to wrap up this article in helping us think about where the push and pull of present political paradigms might lead us:

…the kingdom of brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of communism nor the antithesis of capitalism, but in a higher synthesis.”