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Trump has won the US elections by a landslide. That means many things. None good. One of the analyzes that interested me the most is written by Cooper Lund on his Substack channel. Cooper distinguishes between the Democratic and Republican electorate in terms of institutional trust. An electorate that trusts institutions in a broad sense (including the media) and one that no longer trusts the traditional mediations that reproduce society and is looking for something else.
The way in which he describes the erosion that leads to this logic of institutional discredit or distrust does not exactly move within the framework of the left, which for the moment analyzes the defeat by demanding from Harris a more ambitious program that is more attached to the material needs of the working classes and the impoverished majorities, but rather places it in an infrapolitical place. In a more or less systematic production of neoliberal banality through Instagram reels, TikTok videos or propaganda on Twitter. A constant bombardment of signals whose objective is to capture your attention while confusing you. Signs that promise you practically everything, doing practically nothing. A mix between coaching, the promise of wealth of bitcoin and the pioneers of the wild west. Don’t trust anything or anyone. Only you can get ahead, but if you are smart and ruthless enough, the world will open up to you and restore your well-being.
Trust, therefore, has moved to another place. What was there does not work and the way to move forward is another. The institutions are not going to help you. The difference in voting between the African American and Latino populations is paradigmatic. What socialization frameworks each one handles and where they come from. The question is not whether or not to have hope, but where to place it.
From that point of view, Trump’s hoaxes are not lies that confront the truth. The left doesn’t quite understand that. What is true for the left is a rational and measurable fact based on the teachings of the Enlightenment. Faced with that rational and measurable fact, the hoax would simply be a fact that is not tactically false, but irrational. Hoaxes don’t work like that. The important thing about hoaxes is never their lyrics, it is always their music.
The lyrics of a hoax say that Trump has said that Haitians eat their pets. What music does is separate a minority from the rest to safeguard that rest as civilized. The election of the Haitian population is not coincidental because it is a hoax that does not threaten or attack the Latin social majorities (Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Venezuelans, etc., etc.). When a few weeks later at the Madison Square Garden rally, a guest comedian said that Puerto Rico was an island of garbage, the Trump campaign rushed to correct him and immediately tried to prevent the problem from spreading. That is, they distinguish perfectly between the hoaxes that serve them and those that don’t.
Something similar happens with DANA. The hoaxes have not had the objective of saving or protecting Mazón’s calamitous management at the head of the Generalitat, but rather reminding the population that they are alone and that the institutions are cruel. The parking hoax where there would have been thousands of deaths has had two phases. One prior to discovering that there were no deaths, the objective of which was to lengthen and increase the magnitude of the tragedy in our heads. Therefore, increasing the feeling of anguish and isolation in the face of the cold certainty of the data. That phase was very general. Secondly, once it was known that there were no deaths, the objective was different, more minority and niche, but focused on that logic of cruelty, saying that the government was hiding reality. Something similar happens with the messages that indicate that the government does not allow certain aid to arrive or throws away things that people donate, etc., etc.
Although the motto that the right tries to appropriate is “only the people save the people”, very soon the music is “you are very alone and everything is very cruel” because the extreme right is not interested in any collective structure that reproduces mechanisms of trust in the old sense of the term (trust in the autonomous forces of society to move forward, or trust in the strength of societies and institutions to move forward) but in terms of a new type (isolation, distrust, cruelty).
In this scenario, every progressive practice, no matter if it is Kamala Harris or the progressive coalition government in Spain, has to start from the fact that the greatest factor of erosion is, precisely, that the institutions do not arrive or arrive on terms that no longer exist. They serve a distrustful population.
Therefore, the issue is not exactly “being more left-wing” in the sense of proposing more radical measures, but rather ensuring that society NOTICES the measures and being extremely radical in that.
The 20th Century State and its socialization institutions are losing the battle against a much faster and more direct, disintermediated machinery that configures a type of leadership very similar to Trump’s. A type of spectacular leadership, very vertical in the sense not so much of authoritarian, but of very direct, which produces the idea that democracy is less attractive and less efficient.
This is what the fight is about. Not to answer a hoax
#music #hoax #Trump #DANA
