Truth bears repeating
On American empire, polite fascism, and the slow erasure of dissent—from Baldwin to the algorithm movie.
Truth is formed from repetition, solidified through repetition, held through repetition. Truth bears repeating.
In the torrent of moralising messages from US officials about stolen elections and drug dealing in Venezuela, it’s important to remind oneself of an indisputable fact: the United States is not – has never been – a defender of freedom and democracy at home and abroad. It is an empire built on slave labour and resourced by an immense corporate economy. Its global reach is enabled by increasingly rogue financial and tech sectors, a $1trillion annual military budget, and a network of toxic diplomatic alliances. It has done good deeds, and may well do more, but its best efforts are reserved for the ugly work of preserving US supremacy and expanding its hegemony. That is the nature of empire.
In the Caribbean, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, the former TV anchor whose position was secured after he promised senators that he would not drink on the job, is leading a campaign of murdering boaters with barrages of Tomahawk missiles. The US political consensus is that’s mostly fine because it is masks and prophylactics off time at the imperial orgy. For the ostensible partisans of the US political system, the longed-for tide of justice is rising with the prospect of regime change in Venezuela. Hope and history are rhyming.
Of the many competing narratives cast out to justify impending military action, key is the one in which President Nicolas Maduro is an international drug kingpin sending cocaine to drug-dealing Islamic extremist cells in Europe. Critics point out that the yarn is spun just so to provide legal cover as the 2001 Authorisation for Use of Military Force, passed by US lawmakers in the aftermath of 9/11, gives broad powers to the US to pursue counterterrorism operations anywhere in the world. US President Donald Trump, meanwhile, is continuing to lay the legal groundwork with a TV announcement that fentanyl, a synthetic opioid, will be classed as a ‘weapon of mass destruction’ by executive order. Because American elites are mostly lawyers, every problem is a legal one. As such, the empire can go anywhere, do anything, overwhelming questions of national sovereignty with a mouthful of magic words.
The conscience of America, such as it is, seems to reside these days in the podcast sphere. There, well-conditioned middle-aged men increasingly respond to news of the Trump administration’s gross misconduct by declaring ‘this isn’t what I voted for’, despite doubtlessly being aware that what they did vote for – getting trans athletes out of women’s sports – would ultimately have no bearing on whether unchecked data centre expansion would increase energy bills, or whether American-made F35s should be used to bomb Palestinian children in flooded tent encampments, or whether the might of the US naval fleet should be applied to a blockade of Venezuelan oil. Alas, at least some of them got there.
The US has a rich tradition of dissent. Indeed, dissenters are the country’s greatest cultural output.
Take Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Toni Morrison. Take Martin Luther King Jnr, who led the US civil rights movement for more than a decade before coming out in opposition to American militarism and the Vietnam War in a landmark speech delivered in New York City on April 4, 1967. Perhaps uncoincidentally, he would be assassinated exactly one year later, on April 4, 1968.
Take another. James Baldwin.
The African-American author of If Beale Street Could Talk, Giovanni’s Room, Go Tell It to the Mountain, and Another Country delivered at the Cambridge Union in 1965 one of the great pieces of recorded oratory. The speech was, at heart, a critique of the American oligarchy’s creation of the colour myth to maximise its exploitation of Black labour. His conclusion followed along the same line as The Fire Next Time, a set of essays published in 1963, in which he warned about the consequences of failing to end “America’s racial nightmare”: “If we do not now dare everything, the fulfilment of that prophecy re-created from the Bible in song by a slave is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time.”
Before all this, in 1948, at age 24, Baldwin left New York for a more racially and sexually emancipated life in Paris. In the French capital, he mixed with cultural radicals, his fellow Americans Richard Wright and Truman Capote, and existentialists like Jean-Paul Satre and Simone de Beauvoir. He did not return to the US permanently until nine years later, when he had already published his debut novel and was preparing to publish his second. Given his incendiary warnings about the future, how might Baldwin fare at his point of entry today? How might his fellow radicals have fared by association?
While the 2028 presidential election brings hope of reversing elements of the Trump agenda, the Homeland Security piece of the authoritarian crackdown is likely here to stay. Reasons are purely political. Democrats fear voters synonymise ‘liberal’ with ‘weak’, so to counter unmade accusations and allay unfounded fears, they will resist fulfilling their promise to abolish ICE and tourists will have to go on submitting their social media histories, and biometric data, including DNA, to US immigration to obtain an entry visa.
Liberals’ habit of reframing weakness as pragmatism will define the century. Meanwhile, lavishly funded and institutionally far-right agencies are becoming codified in American life, each day more so as ICE dispenses $50,000 signing bonuses to new recruits in pursuit of plans to add 10,000 agents to an existing force of 6,000.
From the point of view of the talking foreheads that make up the cawing deportationists in Trump’s team, it hardly matters that many of these applicants are reportedly being rejected due to their inability to display a grasp of basic immigration law or meet the minimum physical standard of 15 push-ups, 32 sit-ups and a 1.5-mile run in under 14 minutes. It matters less that those that are out there, rounding up random brown people and pepper spraying babies and elected officials, appear to have the mental and physical capacity of condom-faced cavemen surfing their own drool to a 13.59 finish.
What matters is that networks have been formed. There are now WhatsApp groups, sub-groups, sub-sub-groups. There are close bonds, affinities, friendships developed at family-friendly barbecues and during drunken deep and meaningfuls in the billowy smoking areas of bars and brothels. There are debts, both monetary and those borne of faithful acts. There are cover-ups and shared narratives about traffic stops gone awry. Some of these men love each other, platonically, romantically. How can government begin to dismantle, regulate, or reform such things?
There are justifiable fears that any attempt to abolish ICE could swiftly devolve into a De-Baathification-level fiasco which, like the US policy of banning anyone affiliated with Sadaam Hussein’s Baath Party from the administration of post-war Iraq, may ultimately lead to terrible civil unrest and, like ISIS, the rise of a well-organised, well-armed and fiercely ideological extremist group.
However, one must ask: what’s the alternative? A continuation of this campaign of lawlessness, terror, and false imprisonment, but with officers now under orders to tell the handcuffed to mind their head as they are barrelled into the back of the van. If candidates campaign in poetry but govern in prose, the governing slogan could yet be [SURNAME]: MORE FASCISM, MORE POLITE.
The proposed new visa rules for tourists are yet another remarkable flex of America’s cultural and economic power. The message inflates with the muscle: if you want to engage directly with the world’s largest economy, one driven by tech’s ouroboros of fictitious capital and the historic spending power of the top 10% of earners, forget about the moral issues of our time – inequality, corporate greed, elite impunity, genocide, climate change. Be safe. Have no thoughts. Adorn your online life with posts about TV shows, consumer goods, and public feuds with family and friends. Only then you’ll be permitted to visit the country’s many Meccas to worship any one of its many gods.
Dead Internet Theory envisions an internet so heaving with bots, slop imagery, fake news, toxic content, and other versions of signal-less noise that it becomes an effective landfill, good for nothing except shopping and pornography. Those who believe this is already a reality are deemed to be dealing in conspiracy, but at its heart is concern about the death of culture, dissent, and the availability of diverse human opinion in the public sphere – to which these new immigration measures add impetus.
See, too, moves by Trump-aligned billionaires to consolidate the many platforms for news and entertainment under a single umbrella through a campaign of mergers and acquisitions could be decisive and tantamount to cultural decapitation.
A quick summary: Warner Bros Discovery, the profitable company behind Warner Bros television and film studios, HBO, and CNN, is for sale for reasons to do with a $40billion debt it took on from a previous merger. Earlier this month, Netflix announced that it had agreed a deal to acquire Warner Bros Discovery for $82.7billion. In response, Donald Trump coyly clutched a string of pearls and cited monopoly concerns. The Trump-aligned Ellison family, owners of Paramount Skydance, then attempted to a hostile takeover of Warner Bros Discovery amid reports that the Ellisons had provided guarantees to Trump their management of CNN would lead to more favourable coverage. The Paramount Skydance bid was then backed by Affinity Partners, the investment firm led by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and which is buoyed by $2.5billion in investment by Saudi Arabia.
Neither deal is good. Objectively, both are bad in their own unique ways.
Paramount Skydance was formed earlier this year following the $8billion merger of Skydance and Paramount Global, a deal which gave father and son Larry and David Ellison ownership of Paramount Motion Picture Group and Television Studios, as well as the TV news and entertainment network CBS. A takeover of Warner Bros Discovery would give the Ellisons ownership of Warner Bros film and television studios, CNN, HBO and HBO Max, making it the single largest source of entertainment and news in history.
Netflix, meanwhile, continues on a path to world domination through a strategy of currency devaluation – currency, in this case, being art and the experience of consuming art.
To live in the attention economy is to constantly be disappointed with oneself – for spending precious minutes of your one precious life absentmindedly scrolling through Instagram watching algorithmically suggested clips of, say, Jack Black poorly imitating Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson beside a guffawing Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson during a press tour for Jumanji 2, or indeed for watching Jumanji 2 on Netflix. In the context of our collective cycle of technological hypnosis and shame, it’s interesting to consider the concept of the ‘algorithm movie’: a film made intentionally easy to follow so that it can be enjoyed by audiences who aren’t really watching.
“Have this character announce what they’re doing so that viewers who have this programme on in the background can follow along” — so goes the note reportedly passed most often from Netflix executives to screenwriters. Exposition, once deemed writerly malpractice by everyone from professional fiction editors to book club critics, is in a process of rehabilitation thanks to the new consensus among the entertainment arms of corporates. It goes: it’s unrealistic to expect the audience’s full attention, a sliver of the eyeball will do.
‘Monoculture’ is a term one hears more frequently now that online platforms and mobile devices have fastened the seals on post-modernism by making you, a cab driver in Bangkok, a civil engineer in Jakarta, a school teacher in Manila, equally aware of Jack Black’s ability to struggle manfully through a Jumanji 2 press tour. That stories must now acknowledge those who are not paying attention threatens to get out of hand in a context in which content has become God, unbeholden to time and space. Trump, and those in his orbit, understand this power. They see consolidation for what it is – the opportunity to widen their field, push dissent to the margins, their interests to the fore.
Their interests are for you to know nothing, say nothing, be nothing.
Truth bears repeating.