Today I am continuing the serialization of my new book, Why We Need an Esoteric Left. In this section, I am exploring the recent history that led to our current clusterfuck.
In earlier chapters, I tracked the metaphysical and esoteric underpinnings of the American Right, which has lurched over the last decades from ugly ideological fixity to open embrace of Fascist theocracy and anti-democratic tyranny, culminating in the stupefying Trump regime, which poses an existential threat to the future of human civilization and most forms of life on Earth. The rapid collapse of our institutions and guardrails revealed that the American system was already deeply rotten. Trump is a symptom rather than a cause; his rise is mirrored in the ascendancy of similar populist strong men in countries across the world.
That Trump had any chance of winning the Presidency was only possible because the Democratic Party had become utterly compromised and complicit. The failure of Democrats to deal with structural injustice and corporate malfeasance unleashed populist rage against the status quo, making some Trump-like monstrosity inevitable. When Democrats controlled both the executive and legislative branches, they did not accomplish basic things such as lifting the federal minimum wage or relieving student debt.
Clinton, with his trademark sheepish grin, signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996, a sweeping piece of deregulation that caused many of the horrors we are dealing with today. The Act erased strict ownership caps and allowed Fox to buy up local television stations to build a consolidated broadcast empire with a pronounced bias—a mass mind-control machine. The same law contained Section 230, a liability shield that protected internet firms from lawsuits over user-generated content. This allowed for rampant hate speech, the annihilation of copyright protection, and other abuses.
That Trump won again in 2024 revealed bottomless institutional rot. His open advocacy of sedition and his attempted coup following the 2020 election should have brought a swift criminal conviction and a permanent ban from public office. Now we are sliding quickly toward a totalitarian dystopia worse than what George Orwell foresaw in 1984, where people possess no intrinsic rights, no free speech, and can be herded into concentration camps or killed without due process.
At the same time, right now, we still possess some degree of agency. The military surveillance takeover is not complete. Recently, in New York, the Knicks won a championship after a half-century drought. The city erupted into rapturous celebration, with millions of people flooding the streets. On Instagram, a few Leftists noted the marked contrast between millions of people celebrating something that makes no tangible difference to their lives, and the small crowd of courageous activists showing up at Delaney Place in Newark to protest systemic human rights abuses perpetrated by ICE against detainees, including many who were in the country legally. The influencers noted that if those millions of people were to come together to protest against the decimation of Constitutional protections and human rights laws, the federal government would have to give way.
But people in the U.S. fail to act together in solidarity. It feels like the collective psyche is pulverized.
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