Photo by Carlos Pacheco | CC BY 2.0
Capitalism Trumps Democracy
A paradox at the intersection of capitalism and representative democracy is that under capitalism every person represents their own interests. The King of Versailles (Donald Trump) illustrates this tendency most straightforwardly amongst modern political leadership. But the paradox is systemic, not personal. And the question that follows is: which is to be shedded, capitalism or democracy?
The bourgeois tendency of conflating technocracy with intelligence is itself profoundly anti-democratic. Technocracy is manufactured social complexity, capitalist bureaucracy as ethos. And bourgeois loathing is technocracy confronted by the logic that drives it. In this sense, Donald Trump is the veil ripped away, the existential predicament locked in a strip mall in suburbia with only the detritus of its own creation for companionship.
Graph: political rhetoric that poses Democrats and Republicans as ideological adversaries is challenged by shared policies to make the rich richer. Donald Trump’s regressive tax cuts serve the same constituency that benefited from Barack Obama’s bank bailouts. Source: Emmanuel Saez.
Against any preponderance of human history that might be proffered: war + fucking + art, etc., the notion of cosmic intelligence that has form as the business meeting, the spreadsheet and the PowerPoint presentation is amongst the least probable. What is so deeply frightening about Donald Trump, his…