Romand Coles & Lia Haro — Trump-Shock, Resonant Violence and The New Fascism

Romand Coles (left), Professor at the Institute for Social Justice at Australian Catholic University & Lia Haro (right), Research Fellow in Sociocultural Anthropology at Australian Catholic University.

Something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you Mr. Jones? 

Since the U.S. election, daily surges of Trump-shock – awful disorienting blasts – have regularly defied our standard ways of making sense of political life. Something is happening here, indeed. But, each unpredictable wave throws our paradigms into disarray. We are perpetually swept into the wake of an event that scrambles the measures of consistency and inconsistency we desperately try to employ. Trusted weapons of analysis and resistance cannot find their aim fast enough to keep up with the whirlwind.

While the new regime bears important similarities to classic fascism--rapid intensifications of white supremacist nationalism, dismissive attacks on reason, autocratic leadership, deepening entwinements of state and capital, disenfranchisement, the attack on liberal and representative democratic institutions, and the increasingly open right-wing populist violence – this new fascism relies on distinctive dynamics that must be illuminated to move toward understanding – and ultimately transforming – our current condition. To this end, we offer the following theses as a modest, preliminary contribution to a theory of the emerging fascism:

1. Beyond the substantive elements of what is shocking about Trump himself, he is a hyper-intensification of shock politics as such.  Neoliberal shock politics, as described by Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine, functions by creating and capitalizing on crises that send shockwaves throughout the polity that disorganize, dismantle and subsequently reorganize lifeways, institutions, and spatio-temporal regularities. While previous shocks have typically had at least the illusion of a substantive character – financial meltdowns, fiscal crises, terrorist threats, natural disasters – Trump-shock manifests more in the very character of the waviness itself, the chaotic aggressively disjointed temporality, of 140 letter pulses, refusing accountability, disavowing predictability, with a serial blast-like character that disorients all who are geared toward ordinary political reasoning and conduct. 

The chaos of Trump-shock sends waves of distracting, disorganizing, and dispersing energy through the polity in ways that defract and overload the circuits of critical response to the emergence of an extreme right-wing political regime that will consistently enhance capitalist circulation and vilify difference beyond all bounds. As the regime moves steadily toward the extreme right (a climate change denier takes charge of the EPA, Goldman Sachs steps in to head the Treasury, a multi-billionaire moves to privatize education, and a rabid purveyor of white supremacist hate assumes control of strategy ‘to see what sticks’), minute by minute twitter flares and ‘protocol smashing’ phone calls repeatedly draw away energy and attention. By incessantly provoking frenetic scrambles to react to each appalling new event, Trump-shock disables proactive movement and oppositional initiative.

2. Most fundamentally, Trump unleashes an extreme sovereignty of perpetual disruption, confusion, and contradiction, rather than embodying a power that imposes and is bound to a single order or a coherent, consistent ideology (though his regime surely orders and ideologizes).

  

 We can understand this as a nominalist mode of shock sovereignty that operates through radically disordered ordering, which simultaneously exceeds order and transforms ordering itself. While efficient and formal causalities of state and leader are still highly operative, technologically intensified and diffused modes of resonant causality assume transfigure the fascist machine. 

Trump-shock admits of no otherness, not even of himself an eyeblink prior to the present. In that way, Trump exemplifies power as instantaneous event with no stable form. This perpetual hyperspeed exceptioning makes Agamben’s State of Exception seem quaintly stable. Trump-shock is like the sovereignty of William of Ockham’s God, manifested in the fact that he can be bound by no law he had made, even to the point of totally changing the past willy nilly.

    In the extremity of Hobbes’ explication, such sovereignty is epitomized in the fact that there can be no law prior to nor uttered by the sovereign to which the sovereign can be held accountable, because law can be none other than the sovereign’s interpretive event at each instant. Hobbes writes: “To him therefore there cannot be any knot in the law insoluble, either by finding out the ends to undo it by, or else by making what ends he will (as Alexander did with his sword in the Gordian knot) by the legislative power; which no other interpreter can do.” (Lev., XXVI) Trump displays this power in an endless series of chaotic tweets, spinning out myriad unpredictable, ephemeral, and contradictory stances. 

   Analysts and opponents, missing the performativity of this power and the power of this perfomativity, often scurry to measure the veracity of his missives according to traditional frameworks (law, ideologies, empirical facts) - or even their consistency with his own past statements. Thus, for example, when Trump claimed to The New York Times that “the law’s totally on my side, meaning, the president can’t have a conflict of interest,” pundits jumped to reference U.S. Code, presidential tradition and constitutional law to assess the correctness of the claim. We suggest that the substance of his claim adheres to the nominalist event - the energized sword that Hobbes describes. The affective energies and powers of this event, however, are not missed by those hungering to unleash themselves from all restraints of democratic norms and accountability.

3. The power of nominalist shock functions through a modulation of resonant violence that is ubiquitous and also unaccountable. 

The affective energies of this movement of will to power animate significant portions of the polity – particularly on the neo-fascist right. As Trump’s Twitter shocks surge directly into the pockets of over 17,000,000 followers, many are propelled into barrages of raging threats against those he vilifies--directly or indirectly. In this way, the violence of shock-sovereignty exceeds the formal channels of the state (themselves horrifying). For example, when Trump tweets condemnation of a union organizer in Indiana or a woman at a rally, hundreds of threatening communications (including murderous violence) to the targeted follow almost instantaneously. 

Picture by Johnny Silvercloud

Just as Trump-shocks come anytime and all the time – these expressions of resonant violence can emerge explosively from anywhere and everywhere. This unpredictable ubiquity is amplified by the intimate relationship between the Trump regime and neo-fascist right-wing media outlets like Breitbart News, which spontaneously launch their own call and response shock waves that vilify, threaten, and enact violence. Rather than being met with condemnation from the president-elect, they resonate with and are amplified by previous and coming 3 a.m. kindred tweets from Trump Tower. In turn, these frequently drive mainstream news cycles that perpetuate the resonance in more subtle and insidious ways. 

Operating according to resonant probabilities, these shock waves have a Teflon-like quality in relation to calls for accountability that follow logics of formal and efficient causality, for they come less from a single location and more from resonances among nominalist shocks that move too quickly in and out of being to be caught at rest.

4. This form of power both draws on and transforms what we conceive of as a neoliberal smart political energy grid that has been taking shape in recent decades. 

A smart energy grid is one that employs a variety of modes of (political) energy production, transmission, consumption, and blackout in highly flexible and responsive ways to maximize power. No longer relying on a few central nodes of power generation, they work with increasingly interactive forms of energy production to create even and usable flows of power across a wide area. Elemental to the neoliberal grid are mutually amplifying currents between overwhelming episodic energies of political economic shock, on the one hand, and myriad quotidian energies associated with radically inegalitarian circulations of goods, finance, capital, bodies, and media resonances. 

Each shock wave simultaneously summons new flows and resonances that maximize capitalist power and profit, energize vitriol, and enhance capacities for future shocks while shutting down impediments to capitalist metastasization. These amplificatory currents are immanently connected with affective currents of fear and rage that both energize and are energized by capitalist intensities - particularly in manifestations of xenophobia, white supremacy, and fundamentalisms that are hostile to reasoning and science. Trump draws on and proliferates these existing flows of power as well as intensities of shock. 

As shock politics moves from being episodic to becoming itself quotidian and accompanied by dispersed resonant violence, the neoliberal dynamics are at once amplified and rendered more unstable in ways that may ultimately short-circuit the grid itself with intensities and counter-energies it cannot handle. 

5. 

Efforts to parse truths, reveal contradictions, or selectively negotiate and collaborate with this mode of power are both 

blind to and disguise what it fundamentally is - a new fascism that exercises and enhances nominalist sovereignty 

through disordering ordering and hyper-prerogative power

. 

The Italian term fascismo referred to the fascio littori--a bundle of rods attached to a battle ax symbolizing strength through unity and the bolstered authority of the Roman civic magistrate. In the Twenty-First Century, the ax becomes the chaotically moving nominalist cyber-sword of shock plugged into the neoliberal power grid of circulations and affective resonances, such that even within government all that is solid melts in the air. In the first

weeks of the Trump administration, the nominalist cyber-sword has been quickly turned on the agencies and processes of American government. In this process, chaos is not only a means of dissolving the recalcitrance of other branches of government and agencies but also a principle of governance itself.

Consider the example of the so-called Muslim ban executive order, the “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States” order issued January 27, 2017.

Preceding the release of the order, different members of the regime leaked multiple, contradictory versions—sowing seeds of speculation and confusion. Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway even claimed it may never be released. In rolling out the order, Trump did not consult department heads including the very relevant State Department nor did he vet the order with the Office of Legal Counsel. The Department of Homeland Security saw the text of the order only shortly before it was released. In the midst of all this interpretive confusion, the execution of the Order was left largely to the judgement of officers of Customs and Border Protection. What all this begins to show is the extent to which the Trump regime enables, deploys and tolerates a high degree of chaos and unpredictability as a mode of reinventing government. While such mayhem in an earlier moment would be an indication of weakness and disarray, the new fascism operates through disordering-ordering, which simultaneously exceeds order and transforms ordering itself. Nominalist sovereignty seeks to liquify government to the ever-changeable will of the sovereign. In the ceaseless exercise of prerogative power and its chaotic effects, Giorgio Agamben’s notion of the state of exception almost seems quaint. Prerogative power doesn’t quite capture this phenomenon. Rather, it is a kind of hyper-prerogative power in which each communicative and ordering action intensifies and proliferates a whirlwind of contradictory and confusing qualities that endlessly call forth new exercises of prerogative. 

   Clearly, radical democratic politics must target the classical manifestations of fascism we noted at the outset. As we do so, a monumental challenge will be imagining how to resist and contest the unprecedented apparatus of surveillance, security, and militarized policing whose potentials have been constructed since 9-11, but whose uses are likely to take countless new and horrifying forms. 

    Yet, we believe all of this will hinge upon our capacities to counter the shock politics and resonant violence characteristic of the new fascism. This will require engaging in a double politics. On the one hand, we must escalate sustained modes of direct action carefully-targeted to short-circuit the worst aspects of the regime. On the other hand, we must develop a radical democratic politics that shocks in a different way, that overwhelms the unaccountable vitriol of Trump-shock with dramatic engagements and magnetic enactments of receptive solidarity. This will take great creativity among those who oppose Trump and neo-fascism. Stay tuned.

Bonnie Honig — Despondent? Or Respondent? (de-)Medicalizing Resistance

Bonnie Honig 

Brown University, author, Antigone, Interrupted.  

I have taught Sophocles’ 2500 year-old play Antigone for many years now and it changes every time I teach it because it is changed by the times. Two years ago, right after the killing of Michael Brown, whose dead body was left lying in a Ferguson road for 4 long hot hours, my students were haunted by Polynices, Antigone’s brother, left out as carrion for birds and dogs: “unwept, unburied,” Antigone says, outraged that the sovereign, Creon, has commanded such sacrilege. In the two years since, we have seen tens more such images, the bodies of murdered African Americans lying in a road, in a park, in a playground, silent testimony to a sovereign police power unashamed by its violence or unused to accountability. Terence Crutcher and Keith Scottt are the most recent to die at the hands of police. We know the rhythm of the aftermath: the voices of the Antigones and the Creons call for justice, plead for calm, convene grand juries, file no charges, maybe someone is fired, maybe not.
I taught the play last week, before this latest wave of violence. It was the day after it was announced that the family of Sandra Bland had settled their suit against Waller County, Texas. Hearing that news while reading the play, I suddenly realized that Sandra Bland, just like Antigone, killed herself while walled off away from others in a rocky cell. Both women were found dead, hanging by a noose of their own fashioning. Both might have lived had they waited a bit longer. Both chose not to wait out their time.

Antigone does not wait because she fears that a long slow death is all that awaits her. For violating Creon’s decree and burying her bother, she has been immured in a cave with some rations to last a few days so that Creon and the city are distanced from her punishment. The rations mean, in a way, that the gods have more time to decide her fate. They can take their time. But this is not a mercy; it is a torture. As she is led to the cave, Antigone airs her fears, recalling the terrible slow death of the goddess, Niobe. The chorus criticizes her for comparing herself to a goddess. But Antigone is not self-aggrandizing here. She sees in Niobe’s example her own future and it terrifies her: “think what a living death she died,” Antigone says. Niobe was “there on the mountain heights,” the stone grew around her and was “binding as ivy” and it “slowly walled her round.” Antigone describes Niobe’s long slow death – “wasting away” -- accompanied by unceasing tears, to this day: “and the rains will never cease, the legends say.” It is horrific: a death that never ends. Who would want that?

James Ridgeway's Solitary Watch

 This is why Antigone hangs herself in her cave right away -- to save herself from the long slow death decreed by Creon. She takes matters into her own hands, chooses a hasty exit from this life and, in so doing, she shows she has agency even when imprisoned, tucked away from contact with the world. With her suicide, she moves from an object of Creon’s wrath to an agent fulfilling a destiny. It is an agency that Creon never suspected she had.

Bland, too, was entombed in a rocky place away from the world, hung herself, and was found, too late, dead. No one suspected she had the agency for such an Antigonean act. And even now, no one does. In its aftermath, her act was medicalized. She had reported feeling depressed and suicidal and was not given the medical attention that was her right. It is part of the settlement – in addition to the money the family will receive – that from now on the jail has to have appropriate medical staff on duty at all times. I assume the legal claims of Bland’s family were strengthened by the compelling evidence that Bland felt depressed and suicidal, reported this to the police, and was not attended to properly. We could medicalize Antigone that way, too. Creon did! He says she is insane, mad. She certainly sounds depressed and suicidal. She says she is fated for death, that she is indeed already dead, and that she longs to be with her dead brother in the afterworld. Creon notes that she seems to “long for death.” But most of Antigone’s readers see her as a political martyr not a depressed suicide. 

   

Could we not also de-medicalize Bland? I read that, in the months leading up to her fateful encounter with Texas police, she had been posting on Facebook about police killings of black people, that she was paying attention to injustice, that she was becoming ever more impatient with racial inequality, that she was saddled by debt. She may have suffered from depression, she may have felt suicidal. These are serious medical conditions, symptoms of mental illness. But they may also be symptoms of rising consciousness, signs of conscientious objection, which may lead to an increased inability to go on living in an unjust world. To be despondent is to be a respondent – to inequality, to racism, to injustice. Perhaps Bland could not resign herself to the stone of racism growing around her, “binding as ivy,” as it “slowly walled her round.” She might well have felt that a slow death like Niobe’s was all that awaited her, too. Who would want that?  

Korryn Gaines Killed for Refusing to Submit to Baltimore Police

“You’re in love with impossibility,” Ismene says to her sister, Antigone, upon hearing her sister’s plan to bury her brother in defiance of Creon’s law against it. “Very well then,” Antigone replies: “Once my strength gives out I will be done at last.” Did Sandra Bland’s strength give out, too? I imagine Antigone hanging in her cell, and Sandra Bland hanging in hers. I cannot shake the image of these two women, impatient for justice, who rejected the long slow deaths to which they were consigned and took matters into their own hands. Antigone worried that by dying in a cave, sequestered from the world, she might never gain the glory she sought. She anticipated the #SayHerName project of the African American Policy Forum. She wanted the world to say her name. “Tell the world,” she says to her sister, Ismene, knowing that she depends on others for her story to be told the way it should be told.   

Sandra Bland depends on others too. Say her name. Tell the world. 

The End of Boehner

Thomas Dumm
Amherst College
“Some in Congress and the White House hold out hope that Mr. Boehner’s departure and the election of a new speaker will break the fever among conservatives, who have been plotting his downfall for over a year, and grant his replacement a grace period . . . But more prevalent is a sense of dread that an already bitter and divisive political atmosphere is about to get even worse.” New York Times, Sunday, September 28, 2015. 

A recent poll of American voters asked respondents if they could imagine circumstances under which they could support a military coup in the United States. 43% of Republican respondents said yes, while only 32% said no. Overall, 29% of Americans could support a coup, while 41% could not. As frightening as this poll result is, it is embedded in a survey of attitudes toward major American institutions. In response to a question asking if the military wants what is best for the country, 70% said yes, while 12% said no. Asked if Congress wants what is best for the country, the numbers were practically the reverse: 12%, yes, 71%, no. https://today.yougov.com/news/2015/09/09/could-coup-happen-in-united-states/

If the rise of Donald Trump is evidence of degraded fascism coming into the mainstream of American politics, then this poll is but another sign of how at least one major American political party is coming to be synonymous with the authoritarian impulse underlying this fascism. Let us think about what the resignation of John Boehner as Speaker of the House of Representatives means in this context.

John Boehner wanted the same policies enacted that his opponents within the “Freedom Caucus” – those far right members of Congress who mainly came into the House in the 2010 election – wanted. The difference is that these members believe that by failing to prevent bills on budget allocations and extension of debt from being passed without the amendments they insist upon, Boehner was betraying the cause of true conservatism. It appears that he quietly hoped that his resignation would at least protect those members of the GOP caucus who would still have supported him in a leadership vote, but also who, by publicly voting to retain him, would have risked a primary challenge from the far right in the next electoral cycle. 

What this means at the level of legislative tactics is that the faction that wants to shut down the government in the name of budgetary responsibility and the protection of fetuses, is doing so knowing that this move is but a barely disguised means for further marginalizing the increasingly non-white population of the United States, a minority which threatens to become a majority within the next decade. Destroying the remnants of the social safety net is by design a way to make those people suffer. For some of the members of the coalition imposing such suffering is an end in itself, what they perceive to be an appropriate punishment imposed on those who they believe are parasites. In that sense Planned Parenthood is but an example of the outsourcing of health services to a private entity: the real meat cleaver is to be major budget cuts that are to be taken exclusively from social welfare programs, which were demonized by Mitt Romney in 2012 as the government giving things to people, a sentiment echoed this past weekend by Jeb Bush. 

Posted by the Oklahoma Federation for Republican Women

In this way, because of its timeliness a tactic of political positioning morphs into the substance of policy. The austerity politics that have been a part and parcel of an explicit effort at neoliberal governance over the past thirty years now has a more brutal and blunt political effect. Here is where it is also necessary to ask whether and when conditions could develop which would contribute to a new reliance on “our most trusted institution,” because shutting down the government is a path toward creating the conditions of unrest that would serve as an excuse for the further repression of the poor, the marginalized and those who would dissent, both within and without the institutions of the media and academia. Black Lives Matter is currently being demonized as responsible for shootings of police throughout the country, even though there is no evidence that police shootings have been occurring at a rate any higher than before the rise of this new civil rights movement. A new group called Blue Lives Matter is growing rapidly, and Donald Trump himself has weighed in, not with the insipid response “All lives matter!” but by denouncing Black Lives Matter, and the residents of Ferguson, Missouri, as being a bunch of gang members, many of them, of course, illegal immigrants from Mexico and central America.

The price any new speaker of the House must pay in order to assume office will be to follow the script of the Freedom Caucus. Already threats of a similar fate to Boehner are being made in regard Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority leader who has behaved in a similar manner, looking in the end for a way to pass the legislation that would keep government running without the trauma of shutdown. 
    This leveraging of power by a minority has its historical precedents in the fracturing of the Second International shortly before the Russian Revolution, when the minority Bolsheviks outmaneuvered the majority Mensheviks at the Party Congress. 

Border Vigilantes, Arizona

   Perhaps a closer parallel would be the historical situation of the early 1930s in Germany, when the Nazi Party, damning the austerity policies of the Centre Party, which ruled through the emergency decrees of President von Hindenburg, succeeded in winning over the industrialists who held the balance of political power at the time. Hitler lost the 1932 election to Hindenburg. But by the end of 1933 his party became the only legal party after his ascent to the Chancellorship, at a moment when the German military, in its wisdom, decided that it needed to throw in its hand with the fascists, believing it could control them, because they, the military, were the most trusted and beloved institution in the country, you know, above politics. The Potsdam meeting of von Hindenburg and Hitler, a sign of the unity of military and political power, led to the establishment of the Reich by the end of that year, with Hitler, of course, as the Fuhrer. 

Fox News Analyst, Monica Crowley

 But the most relevant historical parallel may be the overthrow of Salvador Allende by Augusto Pinochet on September 11, 1973. After the austerity economics introduced into the Chilean economy by Chicago school economics in the late 1960s, Allende was the head of the socialist government elected to end this experiment in neo-liberal economics. In a US backed coup, Allende committed suicide and Pinochet established a dictatorship, presuming to rule in the name of the people, completely ignoring the electoral results, with the help of Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon in order to impose this non-electoral will.

To invoke these historical examples is always to risk hyperbole, and so to risk dismissal. But at this point, that is a risk that must be run by those who want to resist the direction the politics of the United States is headed in. That every new iteration of fascism looks and sounds differently than prior iterations doesn’t mean that there is no reason to compare the past to present, and the present to the future.

Of course no one can predict the specific way in which democracy in the United States, already hollowed out and degraded by neoliberal governmentality – see Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos for the detailed indictment – might fall. But the way the current political cycle is being run, especially the race for the presidential nomination among the Republican candidates, gives rise to deep concerns. Whether engaging in bald-faced lies that while continually refuted are nonetheless repeatedly told without being called what they are, lies, by the press (see Carli Fiorina’s fictionalized version of beating hearts and brain harvesting by Planned Parenthood ghouls, an accusation cynically made simply to enlist extremists as supporters), or the continued argument for more austerity in the face of all evidence indicating its failure as a means of economic growth, or the continued demonization of undocumented immigrants as criminals when they are among the most law-abiding of residents in the country, the Republicans continue to be a mainstream presence in political discourse. These examples can be multiplied, and they all point toward a level of willful ignorance based in fear that lies at the heart of all fascist movements. The margin moves to the center, and only in retrospect do people wonder why such radically bad political actors were able to take power. It can happen here, and to a large extent it has already begun.

Meet the Death Party

Steven Johnston
is author of American Dionysia: Violence, Tragedy, and Democratic Politics.

Scott Walker’s July 13 announcement that he is running for president brings the number of candidates for the 2016 Republican nomination to fifteen. This is not a sign of party division but an expression of its unity. There are no moderate or reasonable and thus suspect Republicans in the field. The GOP is an extremist party. While Republicans insist that they stand for cherished American ideals of limited government, balanced budgets, individual freedom, energy independence, safe streets, small business, job creation, and states’ rights, they also cherish violence and death. The GOP is a minority party that attacks the conditions of possibility of economic, social, and political life for the majority of American citizens—as a matter of principle. It does not accept the legitimacy of alternative perspectives or parties and will paralyze or shut down government to prevent others from ruling. It thinks that it alone represents the nation and should act on its behalf. It will take actions that effectively cordon, marginalize, silence, subordinate, disempower, immiserate, and kill (sometimes spiritually, sometimes more literally) those it believes oppose or imperil its domain and dominion. The GOP cannot abide having to share a democratic country with others. It’s not that the Democratic Party does not seek to govern on its own terms, but Democratic terms allow for the lives of others to flourish. For the GOP, its terms are the only terms possible or tolerable. Its success is to be measured by its casualties.

When it comes to economics, labor, health care, immigration, education, criminal justice, environmental regulation, voting, and the democratic process itself, the Republican Party is governed by a militarized neoliberal ethos that devours the means of its enactment and threatens to destroy the ends of its ambition. 1) It favors a plethora of violent austerity measures that exacerbate unemployment and reduce or eliminate assistance to those in need, aggravate home foreclosures, worsen hunger and homelessness, all targeting the lower orders and designed to keep them in their impotent, impoverished place. 2) It would dismantle public (and private) unions and roll back the hard-won achievements of generations of workers because they had the audacity to rise above their appointed station and make a better life for themselves and their children. 3) Because it loathes the very idea of a government initiative that might succeed, it works obsessively (and will tell any lie) to deny insurance for basic life-sustaining health care to millions who suffer unnecessary ills and premature death without it. 4) It would uproot and deport millions of hardworking honorable people who come to America seeking a better way of life and tear apart their families because the United States is and can no longer be a mirror of their racial reflection. 5) It starves, kills, and renders unaffordable the greatest public university system the world has ever produced because it is public and also because it teaches students to think critically about the very the country that produced it. It thereby saddles millions of students with inescapable debt thereby subverting their life prospects before they have fully begun. 6) It advocates the routine and gratuitous execution of death row inmates in whatever cruel fashion is available because it must kill them as an expression of its insatiable ressentiment at a world it can’t control. 7) Through its knee-jerk crusades for deregulation and energy extraction, it blithely degrades the earth and poisons the air and water in the name of unbridled capital accumulation and unsustainable consumer appetites, compromising the planet beyond repair and dooming generations to come to unknown hardships and hells. 8) To cement these necrotic ambitions into place, Republicans would deny millions of voters the right to exercise the franchise with bogus claims and hysterical fears of voter fraud that would return many so denied to a condition of democratic racial inferiority. 9) As for elections, Republicans, aided and abetted by an angrily aggressive and activist Roberts Court, would reduce democracy to nothing more than a private check-writing exercise by contending plutocrats who think their arbitrary economic position entitles them to political hegemony.

When it comes to gay marriage, reproductive freedom, religious privilege, and foreign policy, the Republican Party is governed by moralizing reactionary imperatives that require others to conform to its manner of living and codes of conduct regardless of their compatibility with an egalitarian democratic sensibility rooted in mutual dignity and respect. 1) It endeavors to exclude citizens unlike themselves from the enjoyment of life-defining and meaning-giving institutions such as marriage, even vowing to change the Constitution to legitimize discrimination. If you’re like Scott Walker, you’ll wrap this apartheid in professions of love, professions that conceal their anger at the formation of a world that runs counter to your system of values. 2) In its unyielding determination to eliminate abortion and force pregnancy on women, it would deny them access to health clinics for proper medical procedures and care, despite the lethal dangers such denial entails as women are forced to seek other options, where they can exercise fundamental rights to control their bodies and lives. 3) It believes that Christian fundamentalists should be able to indulge any creedal whim they entertain, in any area of life, give it the force of law, and require its intended targets to accept second-class civic treatment and status. 4) It believes the American war on terror across the globe grants it exceptional license to unleash its apocalyptic military power wherever and whenever it pleases regardless of the consequences, whether to regional stability, innocent civilians, or American citizens. Those captured instead of killed on behalf of a new Pax Americana would find themselves rendered to Guantanamo, the inmate population of which should be increased, and possibly subjected to farcical judicial proceedings in kangaroo courts or just left to rot behind bars.

Republican predations involve more than presidential campaign posturing in an election season. In the spring House and Senate Republicans presented budget plans featuring drastic spending cuts coupled with no new taxes in the name of balancing the budget by the middle of the next decade. As Paul Krugman argues, the American right would happily see Greece-style devastation unleashed on the nation they claim to love if it furthers their economic, social, and political goals. They would also, ideally, privatize Medicare as part of their ideologically-driven mission to destroy a successful Federal social program precisely because it is successful. Social Security remains a target of choice for privatization. Hatred of public things is a deadly disease with them, which is also why they refuse to invest in public infrastructure projects and public education. Unless, of course, the spending increases the defense budget, which both enriches American defense contractors and enables America to maintain its imperial will-to-power in a recalcitrant world. And also kill. Republicans seethe at a nuclear arms deal and they very idea of diplomacy with Iran because it takes the military option off the table.

Republican commitment to violence and death expresses itself best not perhaps in austerity measures or its culture wars but in its will-to-kill in the criminal justice system where it enjoys freer rein (though here there is some neoliberal pushback given the absurd costs of capital trials). Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts denounced the Unicameral’s abolition of the death penalty, insisting, against all evidence, that it was a deterrent and necessary for public safety. He seemed to believe that since Nebraska has only 10 people on death row, the legislature had no real reason to act. This supposedly judicious use of the death penalty (it’s only ten lives), a perverse calculation indeed, obviated the need for legislative action of any kind. Despite this clear democratic expression of popular will, Rickets insists that he will kill the ten men who still sit on death row and try to force a referendum on the issue. Ricketts can’t not kill.

Dale Cox, a Louisiana prosecutor in Caddo Parrish, articulates the Republican ethos even better than Ricketts when he argues that “retribution is a valid societal interest.” Society can rejuvenate itself through precision killing. Not content to let this kind of ressentiment speak for itself, Cox does his best to stoke irrational fears, citing an alleged “increase in savagery” in American life that leads logically to, yes, cannibalism (killing and eating babies). Because the death penalty is principally and properly about revenge, the state must “kill more people.” Republicans not only seek to impose their ways of life on others without apology. They also act as if the casualties they leave in their wake are proof positive of the truth of their vision as well as their commitment to it.

Republicans, of course, do not understand themselves as the party of violence and death, but the signs and evidence proliferate. When the Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act in United States v. Windsor, Antonin Scalia issued a bitter dissent. It is a remarkable piece of writing—not for its legal acumen but for Scalia’s sense of personal insult. To defend traditional marriage, Scalia complains, is to be deemed an “unhinged member of a wild-eyed lynch mob,” an “enemy of human decency,” and even an “[enemy] of the human race.” Scalia’s complaints amount to an inadvertent projection-cum-confession about how he views his political opponents. Accusing others of hate and of deeming their adversaries “monsters,” Scalia betrays the broader Republican mindset perfectly. In trying to deny, exclude, remove, restrict, impoverish, disappear, and disempower their enemies, they reveal the hatefulness that is at the core of their philosophies. No wonder, then, that compromise in unthinkable and defeat is unbearable. Peaceful coexistence is a condition to be overcome. The very real damage they can inflict on others thus appeals to their constituents. It shows that they are serious and to be taken seriously. The defense of principles, for them, must have consequences—especially for others. They come to life by denying it to them. The melodramatic style in which Republicans advance their causes and pursue their political agendas, positing irreparable world-historical harm to their sacred identities and identifications, to their moral values and their religious freedom, to their Constitution, and their American way of life confirms the dastardly, even monstrous nature of those who won’t let conservatives be and who seek to change the world for their own narcissistic ends. Conservatives must not only protect themselves from the claims (read: assaults) of those who invoke basic rights or equality. In the interim they must find new ways to reverse losses that cannot be allowed to stand. Believing their way of life is in danger; they do not hesitate to place others in like (or worse) danger. The GOP is in a rage. It cannot live any other way. The rest of us, if we’re not determined, will pay a steep price for their deadly ressentiment, as Nietzsche warned.