The Broligarchy‘s officially in full flow. Elon Musk has shutdown USAID, bureaucrats are being fired left right and centre, and government waste is soon to be a thing of the past. They’re really draining the swamp this time guys, and once the crusade through all 438 governmental agencies is complete, the Gadsden flag will finally fly over the ashes of Washington DC like a freedom loving phoenix. America is back baby!
That means I was completely wrong, doesn’t it? If Trump’s actually enacting his mandate of heaven by dissolving the deep state from within, then surely his presidency will do more harm than good for McWorld’s long term prospects. Even Curtis Guy Yarvin’s now admitting he dropped the ball with this one, so it would seem I owe the Don an apology myself.
But not so fast – if America truly is about to return to a Jeffersonian federalist utopia, why does it feel like the new administration’s number one priority is to conquer half of the world’s remaining land mass? First, we heard Greenland would be getting liberated, then it was Canada, then it was the U.K., and now its literally Gaza for fuck’s sake. No, this isn’t a horrifically racist caricature of an Oprah Winfrey show, it’s just the wet dreams of a trigger-happy excentric billionaire any time he has his phone to hand. Uncle Sam is going all guns blazing to instil some good old-fashioned freedom into every corner of the globe.
To be fair, maybe he’s only joking about it all. Even if he is though, why? I’m not sure how funny his isolationist base finds the prospect of Gaza becoming a U.S. territory. Instead, the general sentiment on the dissident right is that he’s probably not joking, but also that this shouldn’t cause any conflict with the goals of the MAGA movement as a whole. After all, it was Jefferson himself that made the Luisiana Purchase, and then there’s manifest destiny and all that. There’s nothing more authentically American than conquering the entire globe.
Okay, fair enough, but then my open question for MAGA is simply this; what is there that concretely differentiates Trump from someone like George Bush? If your defence is that America was always going to continue to grow its global empire, you still have to deal with the consequences of your own imperialism. Granted, if an empire isn’t growing, it’s shrinking, but that platitude won’t stop you from having to grapple with the fact that the U.S. government continues to be run by neoliberal globalists, even if they use a bit of flamboyant Jihadist rhetoric from time to time. The quip they always made that wokeness means dropping bombs over middle eastern children with the pride flag spray painted on them applies to them too, just replace it with pepe the frog or something instead.
I suppose that only goes to show that empire is an inherently bureaucratic system of government. Admittedly, I’m no expert on Roman history, but the consensus seems to be pretty clear that the late-stage empire had a sufficiently bureaucratic element to it. The harsh reality that progressives and reactionaries alike are thus forced to confront is that scaling up society naturally lends itself to mass managerialism.
As long as you admit it, that’s okay though. But it’s weird to hold this clinical double-think that the broligarchy is operating with, because metaphorically speaking, they’re throwing out the very tools that are critical to the expansion of their empire. As all reactionaries should be able to tell me, there is no optimal form of government apart from the one that works in the specific context that a civilisation finds itself in, so why wouldn’t they just use the bureaucracy for their own ends instead of gutting it? If they have the power to make every USAID employee redundant, surely they must also have the power to replace them with their own people.
Instead, all we end up with is this laughably contradictory rhetoric of paleo-libertarianism mixed with F-22’s. However the proposed takeover of the West Bank happens, I can tell you right now that it won’t be achieved through lectures about the joys of federalism from the Cato Institute. This is why McWorld is still winning, and why the MAGA movement has been thoroughly swindled; they earnestly believe in the myth of the expanding foam bureaucracy – a bureaucracy that can easily be dissolved once foreign territories submit to the influence of their American (McWorldian) empire.
But that’s more than enough free advice for reactionaries. From a personal point of view, I really don’t want to see Gaza-coin on the market anytime soon. My point is that the left should try to learn from this farce too; the institutions of McWorld operate against our interests, to be sure, and perhaps their very form is pervasive to a flourishing society. But the reality remains that we need to try to use them to our advantage for the time being at least, and worry about the fundamental restructuring of society later. That’s at least got to be a better plan than just burying our heads in the sand and letting the regime run away with it all.
The funny thing is that I genuinely understand MAGA’s aversion to globalism. Being a leftist, I’m naturally inclined towards the belief that all people around the world are basically the same, and that Jihadist barriers to multiculturalism should always be removed where possible, but even I can admit that scale is scary. Megalophobia is a very legitimate thing, and I often find that being engulfed in the shadow of a domineering skyscraper is dread inducing rather than enthralling. Exporting McWorld to the middle east might honestly be worse than leaving it alone completely, and I can only imagine how the Gazan people are feeling about all of this themselves.
Still, to deny that McWorldian expansion is the world we live in is to reject empirical analysis outright. If that’s what you want, then by all means feel free to join MAGA in their fantasy land, where the pair of you can remain completely oblivious to the never-ending spread of consumerism and the chrome backdrop of modernity. Just try to remember that this cognitive dissonance only arises because upscaling is the preeminent goal of McWorld, so if you’re an anti-McWorldian dissident, you automatically feel like anything that will help augment this process can only serve the interests of the lizard people over at the World Economic Forum.
Yet it would be much better if we could all get over this (albeit understandable) reaction and accept that for now, mass managerialism is a brute fact of our existence, and that the power of the bureaucracy can be used to advance any political project, not just McWorld’s. Clearly, MAGA doesn’t want to do this, because that would force it to reevaluate what American identity really means, but it doesn’t mean that we can’t ourselves.
Who says I never offer any solutions to anything?