Another Blow ‘Gainst the Devil You Know
As a strong protectionist and a supporter of faltering, disjointed efforts to re-establish an effective primacy of politics over economics—building and maintaining the power of sovereign authorities at various levels (from local to supranational) to break with kneejerk neoliberal economism—it pains me once again to see the slapdash ill-explained use of tariffs giving a field day to the free trade crowd as purveyors of the usual “orthodox economics” party line. I personally know a few economic historians and practicing economists who could have explained and designed a coherent neo-mercantilist trade policy that would have stood a chance of credibly, intelligibly contesting our Reagan-Thatcher/Clintonite-Third Way Social Democrat TINA world-system. So, I am upset with POTUS Potestarian and his toadies but my reasons may differ from yours. I also despise the nation-state for the crushing power it exerted on the regions and poleis, but see no other fulcrum that could dislodge and shelter lower levels of counter-neoliberal initiative from the single story and its infrastructure. The US is noisily demonstrating why even it alone cannot achieve that. As there must be a concert of nations that shatter Mammon, and as loyalty to the last man is cheaply bought, an invisible hand and an insentient machine decide our indecision uncontested in the naturalized interregnum. We learn at least empathy for Cassandras and other prophets.
As to the ruling itself, I’m delighted we have all lately become experts in constitutional law. This represents a silver lining to this banal decadent era of the West’s neurotic self-destruction—just as drug abuse taught US Americans the metric system, eh? I’m only taking the piss, of course: we are, in that as in virtually every other significant respect, haemorrhaging our funds of erstwhile social knowledge out of eye-sockets voided by the spectacle that rots each organ of vision, inner and outer, clean away. The drama within the idiot-box cave projections we call our world is as nothing next to the more fundamental alienation it disguises. I own, the symbol can be inverted: Enlightenment is rather a Faustian liberation from said cave, and what we face now is cavedwellers dying by asphyxiation, their lungs unaccustomed to this high-altitude air of uncharted infinite vistas of possibility liberated from the primacy of act. But so eclipsed as real paths are the return to the womblike cavern of wonders and the salvation of Enlightenment from itself alike that the final decision between them can hang suspended. In our time, one must leverage them in tandem even to hold space for a distant coming horizon of their renewed plausibility. No recent event one could isolate from the whole life sphere negates theoria over praxis as the distinctive task of the moment—a continuum of mind-snapshots.
