Hindsight is 2024
First thoughts, following last year's Election Day
Shortly after it was announced that Donald Trump had won the 2024 Presidential Election, I followed the logic of the advancing social order, informed by the prior Trump administration’s actions, to produce what appeared as “predictions.” But I do not consider these to be prescience, as much as finding the operational logic of a system and following paths they lay. Not unlike the Labor Theory of Value, demonstrating the historicity of capitalist relations of production. Here is some 2024 foresight, that has since become hindsight.
In my professional opinion, the first two years will be a blitzkrieg of measures, all centered on converting the state into an almost purely-disciplinary tool.
The liberal nation-state makes itself real upon its population’s bodies through family records (birth, marriage, death), discipline (taxes, prisons, military, policing), and support (social services, educational, health, economic).
All that support, from Social Security to the Affordable Care Act to emergency management, is likely to be stripped down to barely anything, in the name of reducing the deficit.
Meanwhile there will be no shortage of money for expanding prisons and policing, surveillance, the military, and other institutions that control populations.
Expect every opportunity to increase authority and utilize the state’s monopoly on violence to be taken. Expect the state to deputize citizens to give them localized authority to spy and arrest enemies.
Democracy is supposed to safeguard against politics of division, since eventually the voter pool in support will no longer be capable of constituting a majority. The problem is that people thought the Democratic party supports democracy, when their actual role is to serve as a foil to the peoples’ own liberation.
We were not going to have the race to the Reich had Harris prevailed, but she was not going to free you, either. No one is going to give you freedom. You cannot buy it. You cannot wait for it. You have it right now, but you have to take it.
Hasta la victoria siempre, mi gente.
