Musings on Trump's Second Round
26 Jan 2025The ascendancy of Trump has clarified a lot of things.
Trump is after the same thing every president since I’ve been old enough to pay attention has been after: power. He’s just more honest about it. He makes it very clear what the function of government in our society is.
I hope that I’ll be one to (metaphorically) hide an immigrant in my attic. I have no idea what that looks like, it probably won’t be something very dramatic, but there is peace in trusting that intention to grow.
James Baldwin said he wasn’t surprised by Hitler. That Hitler could be produced by European civilization seemed patently obvious to him. What’s clear to me is that once we dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki we completed our transformation into something worse, something that’s been gnawing away inside us ever since. As William Stafford said, “every war has two losers.”
Trump spells the beginning of the end of the grand European nation-state experiment, with its countries, borders, sovereign governments, markets, penal law, and metastasizing militaries. It’s only been around a few hundred years, it will eventually become a small blip in human history. John Lennon said “Imagine there’s no countries/It isn’t hard to do.” We thought he was singing about some idealistic hippie utopia, I read it now more as prophecy.
We can all feel it in our bones. Some of us are terrified of the declining birth rate, immigration, and the end of the white majority. Some of us are terrified of climate change, the toxicity of our living conditions, and the continued proliferation of nuclear weapons. It’s all the same fear, really: the existential threat of the destruction of Western civilization.
But even Trump wants to destroy it, in direct contradiction to his apparent aims at money and power. Some subterranean part of him knows that by destroying the government institutions of social welfare he is destroying the last remaining support for the institutions of the economy, military, and law enforcement. The great mother Kali1 lurks in his depths, she is guiding him to play this grand game of Jenga. That’s why many people who voted for him feel like he is a force of nature.
What do I think the end will look like? Will it be a fiery, apocalyptic scenario, or will it be a slow gentle transition to something different? Will it take a hundred years or three hundred? I don’t know. And in that is the essence of what the future holds: the end of Western civilization is the end of “I know.”
Carl Jung suggests that we never got rid of the demons, spirits, and omens of “primitive” times. We just renamed them to anxiety, depression, bad dreams, and an array of untreatable medical conditions.
The culture of light supremacy tells us to be afraid of our inner darkness and avoid it at all costs. But I say it’s time to start listening to our demons again. Because in that darkness everything that dies is born again.