‘Television Was a Baby Crawling towards That Deathchamber.’ These words are by Allen Ginsberg, writing in 1961, the title of a poem anathematising America. ‘It is here, the long Awaited bleap-blast light that Speaks one red tongue like Politician.’ The most chilling word in Ginsberg’s title strikes me as ‘That’. It knows we know what it refers to. But maybe, ultimately, even the ‘That’ offers a glimmer of hope – doesn’t it put us still outside the killing machine? And the worst horror of the present moment (worst for its observers, I mean, not for its victims) comes from the suspicion that any such outside has disappeared – ‘disappeared’ being the TV deathchamber’s word of choice.
It’s not news that Trump is a creature of the society of the spectacle. Creature and master, emanation and accelerant. He is the image. The mugshot. He’s the picture of himself on Fox he sits watching for hours each day – rightly understanding that doing so is doing politics, politics as our society now practises it. Governing? We leave that to our servants. (What a lovely bygone sound there is to Michel Foucault’s term of art ‘governmentality’. Only ascendant powers think the state is for governing. Leaders of empires in decline look across at Xi Jinping and wonder if he can be serious about infrastructure and censorship and party discipline and the size of the army. Wasn’t that yesterday?)
Define the society of the spectacle. Oh, come on – you know what it is. What do you want, a Helen Levitt street scene opposite a drone shot of children looking at their iPhones? The question is not what the spectacle consists of – the spectacle goes on making a spectacle of its least change of apparatus, the least descent down its ladder of conformity – but what in the long term it does, above all to the other term in the portmanteau. ‘Society’ – what’s that?
Part of Trump’s genius is that he knows, against much of the tide of the time, that an apocalyptic answer to the question just posed is wrong. The pedestrians on their iPhones may look like isolate, properly subservient individuals, carrying their commodity world with them, locked into TikTok immediacy. But they aren’t there yet. The spectacle is always hybrid, partly embroiled in the past – society lives on in it, feeding it lines, interfering with its vacuum pack. Look at the faces of the iPhone conversationalists, look at their hands, their arms. Fragments of face-to-faceness live on in them – indelibly, redundantly – as they launch their words into virtual space. They still have expressions. And they’re not even the set pouts and leers of selfie world. They look like real flowing unconscious embodiments of whatever’s being said, of what’s being imagined or anticipated as response. The speakers are still round the campfire.
Hence Trump’s old-fashionedness: his need for rallies and town halls, his belief in the importance of crowd sizes, his dance to the music (that gift to the comics), his tolerance of ‘summits’. Even the hours spent dreaming in front of Fox are nostalgic – he is scenting out the reaction of a virtual audience, sitting there in some ranch house in Grand Rapids or Duluth wondering what ‘woke’ means and how high you really can get on fentanyl.
It is the time of assassins. Benjie waits in the wood by the 14th green, ghost gun poking through the leaves. He’s listening for cart wheels and the man calling ‘Caddie, Mr President’. He cries a little. His curls are combed for the Perp Walk. Aim for the ear.
The spectacle knows itself, after a fashion. It likes to nod and wink at its subjects, including those in on the joke. The fact that Trump is absurd is part of his mastery; the fact that he knows he is – knows what his absurdity is for – another.
Ah, Helsinki in 2018! Only true masters of the medium know how to perform in front of the cameras like this. Signalling power, impatience, suspicion, superciliousness – not so much aimed in the direction of one’s fellow leader (that was part of the scandal), more at the spectacle itself. ‘We have to do this, but it isn’t what we really do.’ Spectators need to half believe that something called politics is happening behind the scenes. Summits are a nod to the past. But the Trumpers of 2025 – here’s the difference between 2018 and now – are entirely aware that nothing is happening, that the scene is all there is. (The Helsinki summit – how could you have forgotten? – produced zero results on all the ‘issues’ it was supposed to confront. In particular, it left Putin, Hizbullah and the Quds Force propping up Assad in Syria and agreed to disagree about the invasion of Crimea. Trump used the summit’s closing press conference to denounce the FBI. Why hadn’t they found Hillary’s lost emails?)
7 December 2024: ‘Syria is a mess, but is not our friend, and the United States should have nothing to do with it. This is not our fight. Let it play out. Do not get involved!’ 16 December 2024: ‘One of the sides [in Syria] has been essentially wiped out. Nobody knows who the other side is. But I do. You know who it is? Turkey. Okay? Turkey is the one behind it. He’s [Recep Tayyip Erdoğan] a very smart guy. They’ve wanted it for thousands of years, and he got it.’
But I still say, have nothing to do with it. Being ‘behind things’ is what mid-size, old-time powers are capable of. They covet things and burrow away and do ‘unfriendly takeovers’. Our people, on the other hand …
When writing about Trump, there’s a question of distance. He gives every sign of being an odious human being, and he flaunts the odiousness, knowing that it maddens his opponents and electrifies his cult. What he did as president last time, and what he promises to do next, will cause misery for millions of people.
Isn’t writing obliged to answer the loathsomeness and cruelty with spleen? But isn’t that what Trump-fiction depends on? Go in close, grapple and smear, and one immediately feels Trump-fiction exulting in one’s distaste. He rides the late-night laughter. The things they say about me! His Arnold Palmer swells.
Is the answer analysis, then? A cooler tone. Is it possible to treat Trump as a political – a historical – occurrence? A ‘formation’, as we used to call it.
Supposing we take the whole form of politics and leadership described so far, including its ludicrous deficiencies and so far unanswerable strengths, as a phenomenon, an expression, of an empire in decline. In particular, of an empire whose immense superiority over its rivals in terms of military power, control of (most) dependencies, dictatorship of ‘innovation’, image of the good life, and sheer mind-boggling wealth, remains unquestioned, but depends now on an economic system that fails to satisfy its own ordinary middle (read, working) class. This for reasons that have been analysed to death. Globalisation, offshoring, the end of manufacturing, techno-feudalism, vast inequality, the necessity (for growth) of a world of un-tax.
Some of the terms are new here, and certainly the scale and specific form of overreach and overrefinement. Financialisation, interlinked derivatives, intricacies of sovereign debt, monopolies of suddenly indispensable raw materials, the road to the sweatshop in Zhengzhou ever more vulnerable. Saudi fist bumps. Crumbling borders (or the claim they are crumbling). ‘The only democracy in the Middle East.’ But however berserk or bizarre the particulars of decline, it is easier and easier to look through them to the simple bitterness of those who once, so recently, were empire’s low-level beneficiaries. Where did my job go (and with it my health plan)? What are my kids on? What the hell is racial sensitivity training? (Wasn’t whiteness the keystone of the whole deal?) You read the words in the mouths of the mob at the start of Coriolanus, and it’s all familiar, the anger over lost bread and circuses; but you wonder why the Roman saps haven’t yet seen who their real oppressors are. They need replacement theory. It’s the elites. Antisemitism. The lab in Wuhan. Abortion. Marxists. The Pizza Paedophiles. Hollywood. Muslims. Mexicans. Anthony Fauci. The EPA.
The politics of an empire in decline are invariably a mixture of the cruel and the ludicrous. (Ask the Brits.) Nonetheless, the American case is distinctive, and its special character worth examining, if we’re to understand the kind of imperial disintegration that might take place over the next fifty years. We’re at the beginning of the end of American hegemony. A preponderance so crushing will resist to the last. The Chinese century will come in along its belts and roads at dreadful slow-motion speed, swallowing up the Nike slum worlds with an indifference for human suffering that will make Nafta and COP29 seem like acts of philanthropy. One power will replace another in a world system whose integument – military infrastructure, apparatus of surveillance and repression, shadow world of non-union factories and plantations, marionette theatres of ‘democracy’ – will make any previous empire’s seem makeshift. Just think what it will take to dismantle the US’s hundred plus bases across the continents. Try to imagine the eventual fate of Israel, its ‘indispensable nation’. Or decipher the depth of contempt – for one’s subjects, for oneself, for the non-reality the spectacle has made – evident in every pixel of the image below. What will leaders like these two do to defeat the enemy?
Trump is an early warning signal. He’s a phenomenon of transition, only half adjusted to emerging reality. Of course, he’s not such a fool as to believe that he will, or anyone could, Make America Great Again; but his politics has to steer a course between those in his audience who do believe it, or make-believe it, and those, perhaps the majority, who are there for fun. They’re as cynical as he is. Or rather, they are serious about spectacle. About the chanting, the hats, the latest insult. They know that’s what politics now is. They know what politics is not allowed to interfere with: that is, everything just described about empire.
The point often made about MAGA voters voting to worsen their own condition may be correct (for most if not all of them), but it has no bite when voters are persuaded that the other party has no intention of bettering it. Shallow state, deep economy.
On Trump’s style. His mixture of insult, ressentiment and buffoonery is a work of genius. I remember sitting in front of the TV in 2016, watching the Republican debates unfold, and feeling my jaw drop. I’m as cynical about politics as the next man, but this couldn’t be happening. This wasn’t politics at all … The country club name-calling. Sleepy This and Little That. The smut about small hands and penis size. And the complete refusal to let one’s face – that glowering, hard-done-by Trump mask of contempt – relax for a moment and signal that really, ultimately, we (we members of the political class) don’t mean it, we’re in this together.
Only someone who’d spent the previous thirty years supping on the special unctuousness of American political manners – someone who’d lived through Ronnie and W. and Bill – could register the depth of the transgression. That’s why my jaw dropped. What was politics to be if it was conducted like this? Where were we going? What was it in the new era that called for – rewarded – this kind of desublimation? US politics, like most politics, was nothing if not a love-in with some harmless (ideological) rough stuff thrown in. But I don’t love you in the least, Trump said, and if I scratch your back it will hurt. I want subservience, and I’ll laugh in your face when I get it. ‘The first term, everybody was fighting me. In this term, everybody wants to be my friend. I don’t know – my personality changed or something.’
I want subservience, because I’ve never had it, or had enough of it. I want you to grovel, because that’s what my voters want. Yeah, yeah, the prices at the gas station make them cross. But that’s not it. They had power – the anxious provisional imaginary power that the sociologists once called status – and they’ve lost it. Imaginary power is a dreadful thing to lose. Their aggrievedness – my aggrievedness – at having had it taken away is endless: it’s MAGA’s reason for being.
That Obama … That time he burst out singing ‘Amazing Grace’! And singing it well. It’ll take decades – it’ll take a revolution – to mend the wound in America’s side. But we’ll do it. Lynching the image: that’s what we’re up to.
Ressentiment, Nietzsche taught us, is a deep feeling – a determinant fact of our being in the world. We all look around hungrily for someone to blame, someone to wreak vengeance on – for everything we were denied back then, at the beginning. We know we’ll never find the culprit, really; we know we’re making things up; we’re bewildered by our feelings, half ashamed of baying for the scapegoat’s blood – but boy! it feels good.
To have made ressentiment the main form of politics, to have made himself the very image of it, to have it written it into every shaking of the jowls and ‘It-wasn’t-me-Sir’ stare – that’s Trump’s achievement. Here I am: rich, bankrupt, fraudulent, criminal, surrounded by toadies, destroyer of politics, president … And I still haven’t been given my due!
A sceptic might say: All this is nasty, yes, but is it anything new? Especially as an episode in American history. Isn’t Trump just another Andrew Jackson, another George Wallace or William Jennings Bryan? ‘The people have a right to make their own mistakes …’ The people are always looking for a charlatan. Even the spectacle is nothing new. Demagogues are demagogues, always in love with the latest technology: newsprint, the back of an endless railroad car, the billboard, the boob tube.
But all of these previous technics of persuasion spoke or shone down from a distance. They addressed an audience, they made a totality. Of course, the demagogue pretended to identity with his demos, but the technology did not exist to do the complete lying job. The affix ‘-agogue’ admits as much: the demagogue was still a magician, a mystagogue, a bearer of charisma. And Trump has annihilated the idea of charisma. The new leader is not above us. He’s on the screen in our hands. We manufacture him: our fingers are just his size. His rambling, vindictive, uninflected shtick is our unconscious, our aggrievedness, not our aggrievedness transformed.
No other political actor seems to have seen the point of this – seen why it conquers. They’ll get nowhere until they do.
It is a time of assassins – in the case of the UnitedHealthcare killer, of what looks like a studied revival of ‘propaganda by the deed’.
What is the world coming to, when a CEO can’t safely leverage the weakness and pain of his fellow human beings and get rich and enhance shareholder value? Big Pharma, Hospital and Big Bank CEOs are all sure to be wondering. It’s just so unfair.
How do people expect anyone to take the US government seriously after these charges? What about school shootings? What about the attack in Vegas? The message this is sending is that by killing Thompson he attacked capitalism, and an attack on capitalism is an attack on the US. If we weren’t a joke to the rest of the world already, we’re definitely one now.
The death penalty? US healthcare is a death penalty: you have no access to the treatment you need, if you did your insurance won’t pay for it, if your insurance paid it’s for opioids peddled by big pharma. UnitedHealthcare owns the hospital, the insurance company and the pharmacy, full vertical integration. We are all sentenced to life in the American healthcare system.
These aren’t excerpts from an anarchist chat room in Humboldt County. They’re taken from readers’ responses to columns in the New York Times.
The theory of social change on which propaganda by the deed was premised in its heyday, when McKinley and Sadi Carnot and Frick and the empress of Austria took a bullet, was both too pessimistic and optimistic. Resentment and anger existed in plenty around 1900. But the idea that a single symbolic gesture, or a campaign of such, could light disillusion’s touchpaper … that was fantasy. For a symbol to set off a social implosion, what was needed was an apparatus – a means by which the symbol could spread, allowing people to interpret what had taken place, inviting them to voice their contempt for official outrage, annulling, regrouping, disobeying, opting out. How could such a contagion possibly happen in the age of the wall poster and the back street printing press?
But the apparatus now exists. Capital has made it – to its profit and its cost. The spectacle has metastasised. It is everywhere, at everyone’s disposal. (I remember Sebald’s horror at the German term for the mobile phone: das Handy.)
More from the readers of the NYT:
Just look at the photo of Mangione’s Perp Walk … The American government hardly lifts a finger to improve the lives of everyday Americans or to shield them from the rapacious avarice of our plutocrat overlords, but goes into blitzkrieg mode to protect the same plutocrat class. The mask has really come off: we know whom the US government values.
These proceedings are turning into an absolute clown show. The man is already being treated like a martyr and folk hero and their brilliant idea is escalate his charges to such a comical level? Are the feds intentionally trying to fan the flames? By treating Mangione’s case so unfairly, they’re only reinforcing his thesis that the system is broken and rigged in favour of the billionaire class.
Essentially, at the beginning, the theory of the society of the spectacle was an effort to understand the disembodiment of human sociality. It was still possible to be baffled by the process. Inquisitive, manipulative, contact-hungry homo sapiens, that craver of attention and mutuality, had ended up existing in a world at one remove. The greatest fear of each individual remained ‘being out of touch’. But the touch each was taught to take for reality was the touch of the screen. The screen in one’s hand, the screen under one’s pillow. The 24-hour REM period.
Spectacle, as a concept, was accompanied by the idea of ‘the colonisation of everyday life’. That meant several things. Pervasive surveillance. The monetisation of more and more of the species’ so-called unproductive life. The recruiting of more and more of us to the task of providing our masters with ‘information’ about our every doing. The shrinkage of time out. The commodification of play. But perhaps what the situationist theorists most saw in the ‘everyday’ – most regretted as they saw it vanish – was the body clock, the lapse of attention, the recalcitrance of the organism, the idle interest in what someone else was doing, was feeling, was like. Bodies spoke a different language from that of their leaders. They were a reservoir of insubordination. They looked up at the pyramid or the Statue of Liberty and shrugged.
Is all that counter-language a thing of the past? Has the spectacle extinguished it, or managed a life for it on a set of reservations? Art. Sex. Poetry.
Maybe. It depends on the future. Remember that the perfections of spectacle I’ve been dwelling on – particularly the perfection called Trump – are the product of an empire in decline. No doubt such a decline is first disguised and alleviated by a great flowering – a Vierzehnheiligen – of untruth. But untruth consumes resources, at least on the scale now necessary. And resources will grow fewer, be fought for more ruthlessly. You cannot have a society of the spectacle without a constant increase in the rate of illusion. Trump’s second term will provide it, no doubt: he’ll keep the customers happy. Certainly, the weak will be frightened and the defenceless humiliated – this in particular will have the red hats coming off. But afterwards? Twenty or thirty years hence? Down the road to a spectacle without investors. When the app store is frozen, SpaceX is resting, and there’s no money left for the AI special friend. Who knows?
Those who first thought seriously about the society of the spectacle did not imagine it could last. They wrote in a time of upheaval, believing the world had already grown tired of its reflection. ‘Species-being’ (they were nothing if not devotees of the early Marx) would reassert itself. They could not anticipate the spell that would be cast through the following half-century by a speeding up and miniaturising of the image, putting the spectacle at everyone’s fingertips, making it a form of life. (Those who lived to see it often despaired.) The depth of the situationists’ contempt for the mass production of appearances, read now, can be grating: we have all been taught to be wary of condescension.
Perhaps it is time to be less circumspect. If Trump is what the image-world has now revealed itself to be – if he’s the ‘society’ we have settled for, looming against us, cruel and false and ugly and determined to destroy – then what answer is left but a fight to the finish? A plan of campaign, with spectacle the enemy. Not derision but tactics.
Send Letters To:
The Editor
London Review of Books,
28 Little Russell Street
London, WC1A 2HN
letters@lrb.co.uk
Please include name, address, and a telephone number.
