Corporate Fascism And The Aesthetics of Politics
Corporate fascism. We know the term. Now we will see the full ugly face of its wrath in the vengeful fury of Trump. Trump, like all opportunistic social phenomena, is an expression of a trending wave of collective sentiment and will. He is neither sole cause (autonomous agent) nor simple effect (isolated outcome) of a deliberate plan of action on his own part. But the specifics of his own psychopathology optimize his virulent capacity for destructive impact. Watching and listening to the monster speak in the state of His Union address would be sufficient, even without other mountains of evidence, to feel the grotesque distortions of the personality in all of its many disorders. Now his rabid vengeance is unleashed and unrestrained.
But it would be a mistake to attribute the full credit for current political phenomena to the individual man. A confluence of forces created the conditions for his rise, among them, the deregulation of economic systems that unleashed unregulated capital at an unprecedented scale. (An argument could be made that capital was never regulated, only the institutions that managed it were subject to limits on risk and abuse.) Now, however vigilant we imagine ourselves to have been, we will be witness to wanton destructive power with the full driving energy of unregulated corporate capital behind…
