This one is a bit of a meander (first as shower thought, then as free-write, and finally as free newsletter post, the great ouroboros of intellectual work in 2025) but I haven’t written anything for awhile and so I figured – what the hell, let’s lose some subscribers today. There are a few reasons I haven’t written anything for public consumption in a minute, though the private scribblings continue at their typically feverish pace, don’t you worry. For one, I have been working on an article for an actual publication which should be out soon; I’ll let you know when it is. Mostly, though, it’s a constellation of related reasons, spelling out “DESPAIR” in astrological glyphs. The state of the world is absolutely terrifying right now, and neither I nor anyone else has much of value to say about it; public-facing writing about it all feels, in its current iteration, broken as it has been by the perverse incentives of publishing, all rather bad-faith and inauthentic.
But here I go anyway, powered by the jitters, palpitations, and false courage attendant to downing a couple of cold brew coffee smoothies. (These, my latest obsession, are further eroding my ability to produce any writing for anyone to read, since the embrace caffeine as my One Last Vice is fucking up my sleep quality.) I started piecing together the thoughts I’m going to attempt to tessellate today in the shower (where else), listening to my friend Tim’s excellent appearance on the Chapo Trap House podcast for an episode about Medicaid and the imminent attacks on it. Tim has two qualities, rarely co-present in the same person – an understanding of the arcana of health policy and an empathetic facility with human suffering – that I quite honestly envy. It’s a good discussion of the problems with US health care and the sheer cruelty of it, and I agree tremendously with the parts of the discussion pointing out how much human potential is wasted so that rents can be extracted from the rationing of care. I also agree tremendously with the ominous sense that the particular structure of health care contributes to general, population-scale increases in sickness, in stress, in mental illness, and in continued fraying of social cohesion. I share Tim’s and the hosts’ foreboding about the violence that is built in to the health care system working its way out as more, lateral violence, as people lashing the fuck out at themselves and each other because they just can’t fucking take the bullshit anymore.
All of this is absolutely convincing on its face. I do think there is another, underappreciated dimension to it, though. It’s easy to believe that this stuff is all just an adjunct to the singular profit motive programmed into US health care, and for a long time, that was a reasonably sufficient belief. I think we also need to be really, especially scared about the synthesis of this routinely evil stuff with the strand of techno-fascist accelerationism that now has the entire country in a chokehold. (For a great reading of the two apparently contradictory strains in the contemporary right wing, may I recommend Erik Davis’s newsletter.) That stuff, the Musk and Thiel stuff, the proliferation of lossy, expensive, destructive “AI tools” that are being shoved into every aspect of human existence, is predicated on a basic belief about the expendability and uselessness of human beings in general. In this sense, the squelching of human potential, the extreme inefficiencies in health care “markets,” the increases in social suffering and social volatility are not only convincing arguments for abandoning this system and creating a new one – they are, in the technofascist program, extremely intended outcomes. They want to create a world where we have nothing to live for, and where we’re tearing each other apart from the stress and difficulty of it all, because they’re betting that this will create the conditions to further consolidate their power. They’re not wrecking the government in spite of the suffering and chaos it will cause, but rather because of that; it’s their gamble – a dangerous one, but the one they’re making – that smashing the state and precipitating general societal breakdown creates opportunities for them.
As the world turns to shit, life grinds on, and I’ve been reading a little bit of the structural Marxist Nicos Poulantzas on the state. Frustrated as I am by asinine mutual aid discourse as, for example, the public infrastructure that sustains my one-time profession is being imploded (look a few paragraphs ahead for the Great Gutting of the CDC Show), I have been thinking that it’s seriously time for the left – any left worth being a part of right now – to reengage the role of the state. Much as it’s understandable to want to retreat from it, the state does structure the contours of popular power and political possibility. I am not going to try to summarize the little bit of State, Power, Socialism that I’ve read, except to pluck out one little line in his section on what he calls “authoritarian statism.” Authoritarian statism involves, among many other things, the “establishment of an entire institutional structure serving to prevent a rise in popular struggles.” What is interesting to me at this moment is how much this institutional structure is constituted as a negative space, through the destruction and hollowing out of already-embattled institutions of so-called civil society. On what passes for the American left, long dominated by NGO philanthropy, we’re dealing with the fallout of a sudden and total shift in “cost-benefit” calculus for the stupid little nonprofits that sustain the actual work. Poulantzas continues: “Probably for the first time in the history of democratic States, the present form not only contains scattered elements of totalitarianism, but crystallizes their organic disposition in a permanent structure running parallel to the official State.”
Now, we have to keep in mind that he was writing this in the 1970s, in Europe, but there are two things this makes me think of. First, Ernst Fraenkel’s concept of the “dual state,” less an aggrupation of formal institutions than a parallel shadow structure of lawlessness running right underneath the normal, business-as-usual legal structure. Second, this did make me think of Guattari (ugh), who says something to the effect of, military machinery crystallizes a fascist “desire” no matter the actual composition or bent of the political regime. The juxtaposition with Guattari shouldn’t be overdrawn – the whole “desire” thing is an extremely arcane intervention on a point of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory that doesn’t matter, and furthermore I’m not sure what I totally make of the essay this is drawn from (“Everybody wants to be a fascist”).
My dude Stuart Hall calls out the other half of Guattari’s couplet (Deleuze) in his intro to State, Power, Socialism for “cheerfully flooding the concept market with grandiose terroristic and mystifying Notions of the Despot, the Master, and a few more of the same stamp” (“the typically escapist phenomenon of large-scale systematizations – First and Final Philosophies of Power that, more often than not, simply regurgitate the stale terminology of the most traditional spiritualist metaphysics”), and Guattari does do something of this in the essay, positing on some kind of transhistorical or transversal “desire” that can be variously precipitated out as fascism (macro- or micropolitical) across different contexts. That seems to be advancing quite a strong claim about human nature/the nature of the psyche that I’m not sure I’m on board with, but I do think Guattari is on to something, and I do think that there is an important way – just coming in to focus – that this “desire” has crystallized in various forms over the last few decades that we are now just able to recognize as individual train tracks on the road to total despotism. I’m thinking here, as just one example, of the construction of DHS/ICE and its surveillance apparatus, dating back to the GWOT days, which is now coming into its own as a fully operational, mostly autonomous, parallel dimension of total lawlessness.
Which brings me to a few pieces of actual news to end on. I saw a tweet (a skeet? A tweet, within a skeet?) from Josh Marshall today (not linking because I don’t want to embed it) parsing some approval numbers for Trump. Apparently, since January, Trump’s net approval rating has only slightly decreased. People are pissed off about the economy and in particular about Elon Musk, but the net approval number is buffered by general approval for Trump’s immigration and border policies. Transhistorical fascist desire, anyone? It seems to me that a particularly important challenge for the left right now is to try to articulate these things all together – the stripping of the state, the concentration of power in the Executive, the bone-deep cuts and capricious firings and the dizzying constriction of formal liberties and emergence of the “dual state.”
The timeline today is furthermore lit up like a switchboard with news about how the CDC has, in basically one fell swoop, been completely gutted; the life-and-death human impacts and the complicated grief (help me, Lacanian psychoanalysis! Just kidding, please don’t) are understandably occupying most of the discursive space but we would do well to remember who is doing this and why. As with the Medicaid stuff, this is part of the vision of a world sans human beings. These techno-creeps have no illusion that these systems will somehow continue to function amid the cuts, it’s not ignorance about the human impacts they’re likely to have or optimism in some kind of doctrine of efficiency. It’s about stripping the state to self-deal, and it’s about the gamble on total social breakdown, that it will cut in the billionaires’ favor.
And finally, I saw a news article about how Cantor Fitzgerald is now calling for RFK Jr. to be removed as head of HHS. This comes on the heels of Peter Marks’s forced resignation from FDA and subsequent drop in biotech shares. I understand the desperate wish for someone to save us from this nightmare and the desperate desire to have anybody but RFK Jr. in charge of HHS. (He’s executing on a political program that he is allowed to put his spin on but is not really in control of, I will just remind you.) I still want to push back on this Cantor Fitzgerald thing a little bit. The whole problem we’re in is a result of what Poulantzas calls the loosening of the “ties of representation” of anything like the public interest in the political sphere. To directly borrow Poulantzas’s extremely European Marxist jargon, this involves the replacement of compromise formulated as national interest with the direct presence of the interests of the only class that currently qualifies as a political subject (like six creepy billionaires) in the administrative state, the administrative state which is increasingly the direct executor of executive will (what used to be called “policy”). I will conclude by suggesting that any kind of humane solution to this problem involves not the largesse of powerful investment banks but instead the buildup of robust democratic cultures that can at least counterbalance – if not diminish – the power of capital’s representatives. What a glorious time to be free!