Dec 01 2024 96 mins 2
Dear, stubborn, listener,
Are you still there?
For our weirdly unlikely 50th Episode -- mine and Jake's Gold Anniversary or something(?) -- we went populist. Donald Trump's re-election is now fact, but the meaning of that fact remains to be articulated, engaged-with.
We seem to be in agreement that more than Trump's winning the elections, the Democratic party lost it. Jake calls it 'libtardation;' we think it is a new socio-political category.
Were they ever an alternative? Trump's campaign (among others) exposed long-standing hypocrisies surrounding all the things they care about. The people of America were faced with an alternative between a fake solution that has proven itself to be ineffectual, and a visceral expression of rage that had not been seen before.
Woke leftism plays a role we will discuss at length in this episode; both an agent and a symptom of said hypocrisies. A kind of Wittgensteinian language game, as Jack puts it, which rewards further vivisections of ressentiment in the 'soul' of the individual, as Sagi sees it. We show this in cancel culture and how social media discourses become toxic and destructive to discourse (where words and signs of value are being cancelled left and right, pun intended). Not to mention stuff like 'DEI' and its policing of "diversity" "equity" and "inclusion" -- three values abused by the left, mined hollow by woke discourse until it is too toxic to consider, and left ripe for the Bannons of America to prove that these values were always inherently empty.
This emptiness, of course, is the point of the Democratic-Republican dance in a United States that has never seriously dealt with its 'spirit', that is, the contradictions that are haunting this 'manifest destiny' crowd form the first. One says 'Justice' and the other says 'Power'; and so long as Justice keeps ridiculing and denying the role of power in Justice -- what Derrida called the force of Law -- they leave the values to rot from within until it's the other partner's turn to say "hey this value is defunct, so let's give up on it altogether."
As Andy put it, Americans were given a choice between two right wing parties...
There's a lot more we talked about there.
Have a listen, dear audient (and despair..)
Stars: WWJD; Beast & Sovereign; Marx Grudge....
*Thumbnail courtesy of Arash Akhgari (and Sagi).
