Trump as symptom

Trump may be a Republican president but he should be understood as the product of the degeneration of both parties and, more broadly, as a symptom of a ruling class in crisis. Without the collusion of a party that had the audacity to nominate the word-salad spewing, DEI-darling Kamala Harris as a replacement for the senile Biden, Trump would never have come to power. What is significant is that these were the only two options the ruling class could scrape from the bottom of its barrel. The European elites are similarly hard-pressed. The EU is led by vain morons.

Capitalism has consequences. One of them is the inexorable imbecilization of the bourgeoisie. The old slogan "socialism or barbarism" has never seemed more apt. Barbarism is many things, cruelty and violence foremost, but also the mental vacuity, the headlessness, that turns ostensibly rational animals into destructive automata.

This is what happens

 when social media reduces discourse to an exchange of memes and one liners.

America’s economy isn’t working for many people who grew tired of being gaslit about how great the economy was, so there is a nihilistic sense that we should just burn it all down. Understandably, people who have been fucked over or sidelined want revenge against those who did well in the economy under the previous system. Despite this mentality among a large segment of Trump supporters, Trump primarily respects people who are winners under capitalism and has contempt for the less well off people who support him.

Liberalism and populism are the crest and trough of an oscillation that is tearing apart an arrangement that has come to the end of its life and can neither go forward or backward.  The is how the modern project comes undone. We could talk of a crisis of capitalism but that would be to reduce what Guenon called the crisis of the modern world to a purely economic/political crisis. Neither side in this exchange of barbed inanities has the language or breadth of vision to grasp the metaphysical import of the situation. They trade blows in a gladiatorial arena soon to be buried under the rubble of an extinct civilization.