As has been the practice for more than a few decades, Donald Trump ran as a political outsider, threatening to blow the system up if elected. Ordinary DC chair warmers, as the collectors of political donations to support oligarchic control over the rest of us, represent the institutionally-mandated mode of ‘governing’ in the US. Trump came to the job with a list of long-discredited ideas that less intrepid souls would have understood to be both idiotic and self-destructive. One possible way to consider this contest is as between the political parties. One party supports one flavor of policies and the other party favors another. As should be evident at this point in history, that system put in place a tiny group of oligarchs making really bad decisions for the rest of us. Crypto grifts and AI? This is what happens when a ‘heads, they win, tails we lose,’ power dynamic is in place. The good news for the few is bad news for the rest of us. More

When I was presented with today’s topic, my first response to myself was, “What is the left anyway?” What the left is called upon to do is to imagine a world without borders. If we can’t do that, if we can’t even imagine it and fight for it, then we’re giving up and conceding defeat before the game begins. We are not in a fight only with the current regime, but we are in a fight against its opponents also. We are in an unrelenting fight against power, against domination, against all authority to build up any coercive apparatus like a border. There is no pro-border left. The left cannot consider immigration in isolation, because it is not one thing and it is not sealed off from a host of other factors within the social totality. Do we actually believe we could speak of these crises of refugees and mass movements without considering the war economy and aggressive wars of our government? More

In a normal presidential race, a candidate who defended a corrupt police officer on trial for murdering a 5-year-old girl wouldn’t even be in the running. The only member of Rio de Janeiro’s state legislature to vote against extending maternity leave, who had hired the girlfriend and mother of one of the state’s most notorious death squad leaders, Adriano da Nóbrega, as ghost employees in his state congressional cabinet for more than a decade, and who was under investigation for laundering millions of dollars, would have a hard time reaching double digits in the polls. A man who chose a vice presidential running-mate who was under investigation for raping a 13 year-old girl would never emerge as a front runner in a Brazilian presidential race. This was not a normal election. More