Anti-politics and the scourge of authoritarianism

The performance of American politics, in the age of Donald Trump, has been reduced to a carnival of unbridled narcissism, deception, spectacle, and overloaded sensation. What happens to a democracy when it loses all semblance of public memory, and the welfare state and social contract are abandoned in order to fill the coffers of bankers, hedge fund managers, and the corporate elite? What happens when disposable populations are brushed clean from our collective conscience, and are the object of unchecked humiliation and disdain by the financial elite? In trying to grapple with such questions, this paper suggests that when democratic agency amounts to an electoral choice between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, we enter into a ‘world order’ of anti-politics – a ‘collective will’ shorn of both the promise of transformation and a future of democracy. What follows reflects on the possibility of a new language of liberation, at a time when language itself has lost its potential for reference in a culture of compulsive forgetting and myth-making. The task ahead of us, this essay maintains, calls for a coming together of broad-based social struggles in the everyday with a relentless questioning of what passes for neoliberal ‘commonsense’.