Beyond Belief | Defector

In the absence of any actual recourse or meaningful agency where the material terms of your existence are concerned, you are permitted to create a reality of your own. You can’t fully live there because there’s nowhere to cook or sleep, but you can decorate it however you like. This space is not and cannot really ever be home, and also it is not even really safe—there are always sketchy guys letting themselves in and going through your stuff, grabbing at your wallet, constantly issuing what are very clearly threats in the form of insulting advice. There is a screen you can watch, but it mostly just shows commercials in a little box surrounded by tickers and betting lines and blaring chyrons lousy with incomprehensible AI babble, things that are shaped like words but are not. When the news is on, it looks and sounds just about the same.

It sucks, pretty much, and the more time you spent there the more deranging it would become. But also consider the alternative—the other reality in which everyone must sleep and eat and physically live alongside everyone else, where the choices are narrower and more consequential, and which is so, so much more expensive and more coercive. The worse that actual reality gets, the more appealing the alternative—even the most false and assaultively scammy and luridly incoherent alternative—might seem. There is no real agency in any of it, and certainly nothing like actual escape in that other bespoke reality; everything that looks like human connection eventually reveals itself as some sort of extractive grift. But when contrasted with the dwindling and demeaning options on offer in the reality that all Americans share, which is mostly the user-facing side of an annihilating, brutish, lavishly anti-human capitalism, the ability to pick a poison (or some degrading fandom, or born-to-lose parlay, or life-warping political mania) still at least scans as a choice. You’re getting some benzene in your drinking water either way; the choice is between stories explaining how and why it got there, between some mostly false sense of reality and the sheer senseless fact of it.

That many Americans not only believe incredibly strange and wrong things but will also dutifully and willfully wreck their lives in service to those beliefs is not really a new development. It is not just true of Americans, either, although a strident kookery built around rancid delusions is and has long been a fundamental American way of being. That the depravity and abstraction of American politics at this moment is to some extent the result of a bad and worsening information environment—of too many of those individuated alternative realities being nudged outward into Escher-ian impossibility by corrosive algorithms and the influence campaigns of outlandishly predatory elites and various toxic and longstanding cultural derangements—seems to me self-evidently true, but also insufficient.

For one thing, it was true well before Donald Trump won a second term in office. While the depravities and abstractions of all that bad information were necessary conditions for that outcome, they are also a market’s response to a depraved and abstracted—and precarious, and cruel, and crumbling—daily reality. Everywhere, in every way, American culture works to prise people apart and keep them confused and worried and mean; this is much easier to do when people think of themselves only as themselves, and not as part of any greater community or project, which is why America’s reactionaries have so dedicated themselves to tearing down or splitting up those kinds of communities and projects. This is a good way to keep people working and shopping and pliable, but it is also corrosive and lonely. No one really seems to like it, or to know what to do about that. Living this way, and being vulnerable in all the ways everyone is always so vulnerable, is an atomizing and deranging thing, and it has created a culture and a country that is atomized and deranged as a result.

A healthy culture could not have produced a Trump, let alone elevated him in the way that ours has. He has been a gaudy and tumid metonym for masterful and unaccountable wealth in the broader culture for decades now and managed to maintain that status in defiance of, among many other things, more or less every single thing he says and does. What he represents is powerful enough—to be rich, for one thing, is to be safe in a way that no one else ever really is—to outweigh how flailing and oafish and stupid he is in representing it. If anything, it proves the point; when you’re a star, they really do let you do it. The social sicknesses at work here are old enough and powerful enough to have shaped Trump himself into the pitiless and pitiable thing that he is, and then to have made him inevitable, and now finally to have delivered something like the impunity that he has always claimed as his by right. Look this reality in the face and there is just no getting around how shameful it all is.

Or you could just look at something else. That so many of the people who voted for Trump believe things about him that are manifestly not true—that he will protect the right to get an abortion, that he will Do Good On The Economy and be circumspect about only deporting people who deserve it, that he will work on behalf of ordinary people and not their bosses’s boss’s boss, that he will do any work at all on the behalf of anyone but himself—even after he already did not do any of those things during his recent previous term as president is a testament to how powerful these abstractions are. It is just very hard to know things, now, and the systems and spaces through which people might come to know true things are being eroded by irresponsible capital and razed by reactionary political actors, both of which understand (correctly) that the success of their respective projects depends upon people being stupid, suspicious, and scared. But at some point the decision to believe whatever Trump is lying about at any given moment or to simply brush it off is just that—a choice, made by people who more or less understand what they’re choosing and that they’re choosing it. The things Trump actually says and does just seem not to really matter as much as they should, or really at all, to the people who support him. It’s not that they take him either seriously or literally, as the old first-term formulation went; they simply take him for granted as whatever they’ve imagined him to be.

This strange imaginative project is itself the result of a broader failure of imagination with and within which we all live. The triumph of Trump, which fits within a broader global trend against incumbents, was also about the failure of the Democrats to offer something that seemed sufficiently different. The promise of a better-managed and incrementally improved version of the present was better and more coherent on the merits than Trump’s chaotic and bigoted revanchism, but ultimately couldn’t surmount how loathsome this present had become. It made for a pretty undignified end to whatever this last moment was—a party promising ostentatiously moderate institutionalism and meliorism at home and the usual brutality abroad lost to a no-shit oligarchic power play built around increasingly less idle genocidal fantasies, primarily because many of the voters that had voted for the regime overseeing the current moment couldn’t quite find it in themselves to vote to keep that moment going any longer.

“Everyone is quoting Gramsci on the interregnum, but that assumes that something new will be or could be born,” Mike Davis wrote back in 2022. He looked at that tenuously post-Covid world and couldn’t see it. There were wars and politics, as there are always wars and politics, but not any meaningful broad-based organization or movement towards the common good. In its place was what Davis called “pathological presentism, making all calculations on the basis of short-term bottom-lines in order to allow the super-rich to consume all the good things of the earth within their lifetimes.” We can see, from this moment, what such a future might look like.

We already know how it will work, from one moment to the next, because things are more or less working that way—a bunch of choices, but nothing like an actual alternative; the lurid bloom of every variety of hothouse extraction and scam; a wild and wary lonesomeness pretending to be freedom; some screens on which to watch the richest people human history has ever made congratulate or feud with each other; machines of violence pounding away all day and all night. The people have elected a government that will be dedicated to making sure that nothing gets better for anyone but those already in charge, and which will work to lock in the miserable present that they presently command in place of any less brutal future. They are counting on ancient cultural fantasies and state-of-the-art methods of derangement and confusion to provide cover for that, and on being able to rip up any methods of recourse or remediation faster than people will be able to realize that they’re doing it. They may be right, but they absolutely will not fix any of the problems that brought them to power; those problems are all that this elite has got. If there is hope to find in this, it is that people do not seem to like living this way, and keep trying to find some other way to be. If the work ahead comes down to finding and building a future that might end this present, that sense of dissatisfaction seems like as good a place as any to start.