The individual does actually carry on a double existence: one designed to serve his own purposes and another as a link in a chain, in which he serves against us, or at any rate without any volition of his own – Sigmund Freud
America’s urban enclaves erupted in joy and celebration on Saturday, November 7, as Joe Biden was announced president elect. According to liberals and leftists alike, we had ousted a tyrant from power in Donald Trump’s defeat (the irony of a “tyrant” being brought down by a democratic election is not lost on me). And yet, what was most striking about the celebrations that I witnessed while walking around the petty bourgeois hell that is Williamsburg, Brooklyn, was that there was something off about the whole thing. It was like there was an unwelcome phantom, like Poe’s The Masque of Red Death, lurking in the background of the debauched festivities. Against the atmosphere of kids wearing denim jackets with “I Voted” stickers covering the front pockets, drinking copious amounts of alcohol and chanting “JOEEEE BIDDEEENNN!” in the streets, there was a muted undercurrent of strange melancholy permeating the air; a barely detectable aura or menace. Mark Fisher noted that the most fascinating horror stories often to evoke “the weird,” or the presence of something in a space in which it doesn’t belong. The celebrations of the defeat of Donald Trump then was something like a non-fiction of the weird. There was a presence of something sinister and dreadful warping the character of the festivities into a disquieting pageant.
How could this be? We defeated a dictator, or so they tell me. But it is their disbelief in their own moral clarity and belief in Biden’s political program, or lack thereof, that animates the obscene over-reactions to the election results. Because we, as a people, did not defeat a dictator. No, instead, they, the ruling class, defeated a man who had simply become an inconvenience to them. Therefore, this past Saturday, all the fireworks and tears of joy and Black Lives Matter signages were an unheimlich of triumphalism. In our zest for defeating Donald Trump, an obsession fueled breathlessly by the media in all of its forms, we elected something so much worse. We elected the rule of the shadow. The invisible power that dominates us. Silicon Valley, Wall Street, the military industrial complex, and the security state. Those dark forces that the Democratic Party and the American left are struggling to conceal their allegiances to. Flummoxed with racial paranoia and high on tech firm-focus grouped activist slogans, the country collectively rejoiced over Biden and Kamala Harris – brutal carceral statists both responsible for some of the most damaging public policy passed over the last three decades – rising to power. So, was it really joy animating those street demonstrations, or were there unspoken dynamics underpinning all of this? When our choices were narrowed to an oafish game show host and corrosive corporate power, we chose the latter. But that’s hardly worth celebrating. So the festivities last weekend had, quite literally, a dual character. A double. A doppelgänger. And that doppelgänger manifested as something like a spectral mass resignation that lurked beneath the performative jubilee. Or perhaps this twin character was something else, something even worse: the naked thirst for power. The shadow self, or the double, is found within all our contemporary political relations, and in mining the double we better understand the true natures of the forces and narratives that produce and maintain our systems of control.
Andrew Wyeth Winter (1946)
I can imagine these “celebrations” being painted by Andrew Wyeth. Upon first glance, it all looks common and normal and even merry. The people joyously take to the street in exultation for progress and political hope. But when you look deeper, when you pierce beneath the image and excavate its content, we can start to identity the dark undercurrent beneath the one-dimensional image. Wyeth often painted many images over a gesso board or paper only to later erase them or paint over them with another image that he believed better expressed the work’s “inner spirit” of the erased or the “underpainted” image. This technique allowed Wyeth to disentomb the strange within the familiarly rural Americana settings of his paintings.
If we were to erase over the image of the celebrations that manifested in response to Biden’s victory, what would we find? What would the “inner spirit” of the rejoicing liberal masses look and feel like? Despair? Maybe a little. Cynicism? Certainly so, at least in the cases of party apparatchiks and their corporate paypigs whose careers and financial situations will improve with a corporatist Democrat in the Whitehouse. Abdication? Yes. That’s it. The same American leftists – from Antifa affiliates, to DSA members, to milquetoast suburban liberals – that spent the entire summer burning bodegas to the ground on behalf of Black Lives Matter are now out in the streets ringing cowbells and dancing like buffoons to applaud the election of the writer of the 1994 crime bill and a brutal prosecutor who put parents in prison for their children’s school truancy. Are these people even self-aware enough to experience the level of cognitive dissonance that would be warranted when living with these ideological contradictions? The Freudian double of the festivities around Joe Biden winning the presidency is the apotheosis of what Fisher called “capitalist realism.” What is hyperbolically being hailed as the defeat of a dictator is in actuality the reinstatement of a blood thirsty status quo and the totalizing rule of the security state. Under this new dominion, we can expect obscene censorship (look no further than Silicon Valley’s halting of the flow of images of Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden smoking crack and getting blow jobs for evidence of more of what’s to come), further spiraling inequality, the silencing of Marxist sentiment, the probable invasion of Venezuela and genocidal war waged on Iran, and a media that will run cover and propagandize on behalf of the new regime at all costs. Does anyone actually believe that American dictatorial rule was more likely to come from Donald Trump (who barely had any institutional support in the first place) than our country’s most insidious sectors of centralized power? With a neocon blue dog democrat back in the Whitehouse, protected by a war machine propaganda apparatus the likes of which the world has never before seen, one thing is for certain: “A totalitarian future is assured,” observed writer DC Miller.
Bruno Schulz Pilgrims
If there is one positive outcome of this election cycle, it’s the demonstrable discrediting of the vast majority of what passes as the American left. So many of its institutional figures proved themselves to be little more than, as the What’s Left podcast host Aimee Terese has fiercely pointed out again and again on her show and her Twitter, branding consultants and useful propagandists for the Democratic Party and, by extension, the left side of capital.
After all, it was less than six months ago that Intercept journalist Ryan Grim, Current Affairs editor Nathan J. Robinson, journalist Katie Halper, and hordes of rose emoji Twitter accounts were using Tara Reade’s flimsy accusations of sexual assault to discredit the presumptive nominee Joe Biden as a rapist. Not only were these accusations already of no use to us (electorally anyways, given that the American left had already totally failed in doing what was necessary to make Bernie Sanders appealing to a broader voting public), these same actors then had to turn around and support a man that, according to them, was a rapist. The political economic function of these leftist figureheads has never been clearer: corralling people back into the Democratic Party when it matters the most (in the months leading up to the election). Beneath their raggedy vintage hipster clothes is a blue Armani suit with a flag pin on its lapel clawing its way to the surface. The activists of today are the party bureaucrats of the nearer than you could imagine future. Benjamin Dixon, one of the more gleeful distorters of realpolitik, followed up rows and rows of tweets expressing transcendent joy over Biden’s win with, “I do appreciate the Democrats making it so easy to demonstrate to the extremely liberal audience I built fighting Donald Trump why the Dem establishment sucks and needs to be replaced primary by primary.” Again, a peculiar uncanny emerges from sentiments like these. What sounds like resistance to the Democratic Party is functionally no more than allegiance to it. Dixon and his ilk aren’t fighting for justice, they are vying for better positions within the party machinery, pitching themselves as its next generation. “Orange man Drumph very bad” or “Joe Biden a war criminal but we gotta get the orange man outta office” are rhetorical devices of dual character. By feigning opposition to the democratic nominee’s politics while reinforcing the “lesser of two evils” binary, they are doing effective branding for the party targeted at those voters who might otherwise be inclined to sit the election out, AND by demonstrating their importance to the party (and its infrastructure) they are climbing higher up the ladder of social and political capital.
But the mask is off. We can see these leftists for who they are. When you can look beyond the radical posturing and the chants and the raised fists of leftist media figures you can see their true faces; as lascivious and ravenous for self-serving pleasure as the horny men ogling prostitutes in the drawings of Polish surrealist artist and writer Bruno Schulz, leftists are little more than market actors working within their own class interests to position themselves higher up in the elite. “The activist” is the doppelgänger of the bureaucrat. The idealist and the careerist: one and the same.
In the race between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, the true nature of the left has never been easier to understand. If you’re truly unaffiliated with the Democratic Party and solely interested in imbuing the working class with the kind of radical consciousness that could eventually bring forth a toppling of the ruling elite, wouldn’t you opt out of electoralist politics unless? Or, even if you genuinely believed that choosing the lesser of two evils in a presidential election was important, but you weren’t a democrat or involved in party machinery, wouldn’t you then try to go through Biden and Trump’s platforms issue by issue and make a substantive judgement based on a material reading of their politics? I hope you would, of course, but leftists are democrats in the United States. There could be a self-avowed socialist running on a GOP ticket and American leftists would still support the Democrat, citing the same culture war issues that they always cite. Biden’s policy record is among the most harmful in recent political history, he has surrounded himself with Bush-era neocons, and has refused to concede on any reform that might lift up working people. Trump, on the other hand, hasn’t started any wars. He did some substantial prison reform. Hell, he even vetoed a renewal of the Patriot Act, and got little to no praise for it. “What if Trump could be shown to be less destructive than the Democrats in nearly every single policy dimension?” asked writer Anis Shivani shortly before the election. From what we’ve seen, it wouldn’t matter. Leftists vote Democrat. If it’s not in their blood, it’s in their ambition.
Our politics suffers from psychosis. Specifically, it suffers from a split personality disorder. Every figure, narrative or story in American politics has a public character that tells us it’s one thing but is driven by a shadow self that reveals its true motivations. Joe Biden, “savior of the country,” is a brain dead reactionary and empty vessel for corporate power. Donald Trump, “fascist dictator,” is a fairly milquetoast liberal with vulgar rhetorical style. The Democratic Party, “party of the marginalized,” represents 51 out of the 55 wealthiest districts in the country. The fear and rage of liberals and leftists about their country descending into fascism and their concern for immigrants and “people of color” is little more than moral coverage for them ruthlessly acting within their class interests. And those cool kids in the hip urban hubs taking to the streets to celebrate the victory of Joe Biden and the “downfall of a tyrant?” Their shadow is alienation. Their double is defeatism. Their joy is undercut with a state of hyper cognitive dissonance: “Maybe this is the best we can do,” repeats as mantra in the backs of their deluded minds. Zizek made the insightful observation about Scorsese’s Taxi Driver that when Travis Bickle practices his vengeful murders in the mirror, a direct manifestation of Lacanian mirror stage, “he shows us that he perceives HIMSELF as part of the degenerate dirt of the city life he wants to eradicate, so that, as Brecht put it apropos of revolutionary violence in his The Measure Taken, he wants to be the last piece of dirt with whose removal the room will be clean.” This too applies to bourgeois liberals’ and leftists’ obsession with Donald Trump. They never truly believed that Trump was a fascist, but in Trump’s success they were forced to stare at their own decadence reflected back at them in a particularly grotesque form. Trump’s existence on the political stage was symbolic of the failures of their politics. In their Trump Derangement Syndrome and irrational desperation to remove Trump from office, they merely desired to put the mask back on the bloodthirsty status quo that is within their interests to protect, to different degrees. Those rich hipster trust fund kids weren’t drinking and snorting coke in celebration of progress. They were rejoicing over the return of a brutal liberal order without the impolite aesthetic that Trump so enthusiastically employed. Under the guise of celebrating justice, they were rejoicing for injustice that benefits them as the future elites of our country. The same people who tell us that they are concerned with the welfare of at risk communities, look straight into the eyes of Trump’s mostly working class supporters – the same people who saw their jobs shipped overseas due to policies written by the politicians that leftists propagandize for, only to then be prescribed opiates for the pains and aches they endure due to the miserable jobs they waste away at every day, enslaved to the same pharmaceutical companies who pay their leftoid political antagonists – and laugh. They drink, dance, and luxuriate in the misery of ordinary people. The doppelgänger of social justice is, now more than ever, thirst for power and domination.