America holds its breath as the midterm elections in November come closer. That should not be the case. In even semi-normal times, Trump and his party would be finished. The country is quasi-mired in a half-war, prices are increasing, the housing market is effectively frozen. Most decisively of all, Trump’s megalomania worsens, if that is possible, by the day. America’s 250th anniversary party has now become disfigured into Trump’s 80th birthday party. He is erecting a giant fight cage on the White House lawn that looms over the “people’s house”, and he is preparing to “headline” the national celebration himself.
He is so transparently corrupt that, on Thursday 11 June, he reversed his declared intention to attack Iran with almost comically specious claims that, as he has bombastically sniveled umpteen times before, a peace deal is about to be signed. Rather it seemed that he was clearing the way for his buddy Elon Musk’s SpaceX IPO the following day – since the resumption of hostilities never fails to depress the market on the back of suddenly gushing oil prices. And Trump wanted his trillionaire-to-be friend to have smooth sailing. It is all mind-bendingly stupid and selfish and inward-turned. Considering that the party out of power almost always wins a majority in the midterms, Americans numbed and enraged by Trump, even some Maga types, should be rejoicing.
Instead the media is full of news about Trump calling the recent loss of a Maga candidate in the Los Angeles mayoral runoffs a hoax. He has ordered the Justice Department to intensify its investigation of the 2020 presidential election, which Trump still insists was stolen from him. He appointed an unqualified lackey as acting director of national intelligence in the wake of Tulsi Gabbard’s resignation, and then suddenly announced that he was going to nominate as the next director a qualified lackey. Both figures – Bill Pulte and now Jay Clayton – have supported Trump in his contorted claims of widespread election fraud. The fear now is that as the nation’s chief spy, Clayton will mobilise America’s spy agencies to persecute Trump’s perceived enemies on a much larger and more harmful scale. If the Republicans lose their majority in November by a small handful of seats, which seems the most likely scenario, you can bet Trump will declare a national crisis of election fraud in order to hold on to power. Then, the hapless and clueless Democrats must be asking themselves, what do we do?
The country found itself in a roughly similar place in 1974, when Nixon, drinking heavily and in the middle of a nervous collapse, reportedly considered military action to avoid being impeached and removed from office. Some say that the lupine-jawed Alexander Haig – a four-star Army general who was Nixon’s chief of staff and in effect ran the country during Nixon’s breakdown – was ready to execute a military coup. But if that is true, he stood down; Nixon peacefully resigned.
There were several circumstances that led to Nixon’s surrender to his fate, not least the bipartisan resolve to impeach him if he didn’t – the Republicans were not then the seditious cowards they are now. But perhaps an even greater factor that convinced Nixon a coup would not have a future was this: an energetic counterculture had been preparing the nation’s collective conscience for his abrupt departure for years.
America has never been in a crisis like this one. Yet this is the first time in American history that the country does not have a counterculture, let alone a wild, robust one, to resist it. The consolidation of wealth and of business culture in the 1920s saw the Harlem Renaissance and the growth of a downtown bohemian counterculture in Greenwich Village. During the conformist 1950s, and the mutation of business culture into corporate culture, the Beats thrived. In the late 1960s and 1970s, when the country was racked with backlashes against civil rights, domestic terrorism, a ruinous unpopular war and a manic, criminal president, American counterculture became a global inspiration. In Iran, even as students opposing the Shah deplored “westoxification”, they expressed their dissent by wearing boots and bell bottoms (in the US, bell bottoms were an anti-war statement).
During the American meltdown in the late 1960s and 1970s, you could find the lacerating plays of Leroi Jones (later Amiri Baraka), and David Rabe, and Ed Bullins, and Sam Shepard. There was Judith Malina’s and Julian Beck’s Living Theater and Ellen Stewart’s LaMama Experimental Theater Club. Mailer’s Why Are We in Vietnam? Baldwin, and Didion, and Kesey, and Vonnegut, and Steinem, and Erica Jong, and Carl Wittmann’s Gay Manifesto and Pynchon. And Allen Kaprow’s Happenings. And Fluxus. And love-ins, and sit-ins, and die-ins, and rallies, and speeches, and demonstrations, and boycotts, and walk-outs, and walk-ins, and Buddhist monks setting themselves on fire, and Chris Burden shooting and then crucifying himself as political cris-de-coeur, and Sacheen Littlefeather accepting the Oscar on behalf of Brando, in protest against the government’s treatment of Native Americans.
But now, as the country has been taken over by a demented criminal and his gang of criminals, and incompetents, and pathological personalities, as the American president plunders his country in plain view, as he rounds up and locks up and deports immigrants en masse, as he careens around the world making senseless, purposeless war, as he destabilises the globe while he naps during cabinet meetings, as he holds the nuclear codes in his bruised, palsied hand? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Not a single mass – really mass – march, rally, protest or demonstration. Not a whiff of organised civil disobedience. Not a play, not a movie, not a novel, not an essay, not a nonfiction book that responds to Trump’s zombie-administration with originality, vitality, daring. There were the sometimes well-meaning, and over-indulgent, and futile pro-Palestinian encampments. But beyond the brave protests against Ice in Minneapolis, nothing in opposition to Trump. Or to the tech lords. Or to AI. Nothing on a single university campus crying out against the war on the universities that Trump launched after the encampments. Not a single student protesting the deadening calls, from Trump to the mind-numbingly regular jeremiads on the Wall Street Journal editorial pages, to judge universities by how much money their graduates earn.
Lacking an original theatre piece, you’d think someone would have had the courage to put on, say, a production of Leroi Jones’ The Toilet – about race, hatred, rage, tenderness, love – across the street from every Turning Point USA group therapy session. Now, after Bari Weiss’s commandeering of 60 Minutes, which was once –with important exceptions – the very emblem of corporate news mediocrity, the legendary news show is, incredibly – along with some late-night talk shows – what stands for an American counterculture. Simply by virtue of being partially dismantled by Bari Weiss, the new CBS news head, the staid, venerable 60 Minutes is being heralded as a bastion of subversive vitality. The sad fact is that all the subversive vitality is coming from Weiss and her band of reactionaries.
People seem to have abandoned the search for an original creative response to the new American regime. Ironically enough, the last time there was any American counterculture of consequence was the online forum 4chan in the early 2000s. There the most antisocial and even criminal sentiments were monetised and politicised into an underground movement. It eventually found its culmination both in the White House and in the wider culture, as the lucrative worst drove out the flailing best, all under the cover of patriotism on the one side, and virtue on the other. The only bright side to this is that in taking over American politics, the spitball-throwing right, which can only thrive in opposition, has nowhere to go. That is why Trump and Maga are making war on themselves. (That is why Weiss is making war on her very own CBS.) That leaves everyone else. And everyone else is paralysed.
A depressingly vivid example. The counterculture’s ace in the hole, from “free love” in the 1920s, to the orgies of the 1950s (“I want the orgy… of tenderness beneath the neck” – Allen Ginsberg), to the sexual revolution of the 1960s was always the physical act of love. The genius of the American counterculture’s emphasis on sex has been its political adaptability. For the antiwar movement, free love was an inversion of bodies maimed and smashed by war into bodies in the service of joy. The F-word was stripped of its murderous undertow. Now as Trump and his minions use the word routinely, countercultural energy has been turned on its head. The F-word has been reduced precisely to its murderous undertow. “Fuck Around and Find Out”. You can imagine antiwar protesters shouting some version of that at Robert McNamara, the secretary of defense, during the Vietnam War. Now the current defense secretary himself shouts it at the country he is supposed to serve. He has the energy of the other side, which has no energy at all.
The commercial assimilation of once outlaw modernist sentiments is an old story. But politics stood apart from life’s nether parts. That’s why scandal was always a trusty political tool. Now the revelation of life’s hidden drivers is no longer a political tool, or a countercultural gesture. For the Maga mentality, life’s shadowy depths are all there is. Eating, wanting, struggling, fornicating (if they’re lucky), sleeping, dying is, in this purely transactional view of human existence, the reality of life that the liberal elites have been trying to cover up with their high-minded gibberish for generations. It is Death in Venice meets “Fox and Friends.” For Trump and his masses, the dark side of life is life. Theirs is a barstool nihilism that justifies any belief. They relish what the Nazi anti-Semite Celine (Louis-Ferdinand, that is) called the “biological confession” of the sordid truth of life that a society makes as it slowly disintegrates.
A sign of the times: the subway system in San Francisco – Bart – is about to go bankrupt. The mega-wealthy tech lords who occupy the city all work from home and get chauffeured around when they need to transport their bodies somewhere. It is symbolic of what the Maga revolution has wrought. There is no underground anymore. Everything submerged and hidden that art and intellect brought to light with redemptive harmony and balance is out in the open: dominant, brutal, unharmonised and unbalanced. Existence is strife: behold Trump’s gladiatorial cage. It is why the right has launched that permanent war on universities for requiring the taking of humanities courses that lack the earning power of an MBA. Teaching humanities is a lesson in seeing behind appearances. Seeing behind appearances is verboten in Trump’s America. Appearances have dissolved into what used to be concealed behind them. As in business, there is nothing beyond what the eye can measure, what the hand can grasp, what the nose can smell as fear.
It is of course not just this normalisation of what was once hidden or taboo that has punctured the tension of political, artistic, cultural dissent. It is all the screens, and the drugs, and the infinite niches of distraction; it is all the fragility and rage of feeling oneself cornered by new social and cultural forms that are unfathomable, inexplicable, implacable, yet ultimately irresistible. Trump will decay and disappear. They are actually writing about “Ozymandias” on the New York Times editorial page. But for all the factors involved, what is strange, and bewildering, and even more disturbing than Trump, is the disappearance of vital, creative, courageous opposition to Trump, and to the forces and the figures he has unleashed.
[Further reading: Trump is making America’s 250th birthday all about himself]
Content from our partners
Related
