{"id":13864,"date":"2025-02-03T12:24:04","date_gmt":"2025-02-03T17:24:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/?p=13864"},"modified":"2025-04-16T01:32:33","modified_gmt":"2025-04-16T06:32:33","slug":"moving-fast-and-breaking-things-critical-resources","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2025\/02\/03\/moving-fast-and-breaking-things-critical-resources\/","title":{"rendered":"Moving fast and breaking things? Critical resources on Trump 2.0"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

With its flurry of perplexing and often contradictory initiatives and statements, Donald Trump\u2019s second presidency is leaving traditional media outlets, along with their tired viewers, overwhelmed and incapacitated (qualities exacerbated by the media outlets’ oligarchic owners\u2019 kowtowing to the new administration). There are still many good journalists doing important work. But there\u2019s also a palpable sense, especially on the left, that media are failing at their critical task, leaving the rest of us to fend for ourselves. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This post considers the situation and shares a starting list of some writers and researchers sharing important analyses of what is unfolding. The list has grown since it was originally published; its last revision was on April 15. It can now be found, in shortened form, on the page called “Resistance<\/a>,” available by clicking on the tab at the top of the Immanence home page<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In a matter of days, Donald Trump has accomplished for Vladimir Putin, and to a lesser degree for Xi Jinping, what neither of them would have imagined possible or at least likely. By withdrawing nearly all U.S. support for humanitarian<\/a> and civil society initiatives<\/a> around the world (except for Israel and Egypt), and by launching economic wars against the U.S.\u2019s two closest neighbors, Canada and Mexico, and threatening former allies including Norway, Trump has signaled to the world that a new configuration is dawning: a multipolar, neo-imperial one in which oligarchic empires can dominate their “spheres of influence” in whatever way they like, and that democracy has nothing to do with it and power has everything. Ukraine and Taiwan, like Canada, Greenland, and Panama, are in this sense just starting points for this new global realignment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Where the Americas were the meeting ground for a previous round of multipolar (as opposed to bipolar) inter-imperial conflict, the warming Arctic is poised to play that role for the coming one — hence, the attractiveness of Canada and Greenland, a tacit way to acknowledge the realities of climate change whilst continuing to deny them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Meanwhile, thousands of U.S. federal employees are being fired for doing their duties, to be replaced (if at all) by loyalists to Trump\u2019s authoritarian machine. Whole arms of the U.S. government, including any that deal with the science of climate change<\/a> or the social rights that had long been denied to minorities<\/a> within the U.S., are being “cancelled<\/a>,” and control over the workings of the federal government, including its pursestrings, is being handed away to unelected senior oligarch Elon Musk or to the fanatics at Project 2025<\/a>. Musk\u2019s takeover<\/a>, in the last few days, of federal payment systems and high-security State Department computer systems constitute, in historian Heather Cox Richardson\u2019s words, the \u201clargest data breach in human history<\/a>.\u201d (Richardson\u2019s full report from yesterday<\/a> is well worth reading or hearing<\/a>.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are two potential rays of hope in all of this. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first is that the Trump agenda is so self-contradictory, with rival factions ready to fight each other when the opportunity arises, and rapid-fire executive announcements liable to fall flat once they are put into motion — so things might not end as badly as they would if they were in fact widely supported, which they are not. The strategy of \u201cmoving fast and breaking things<\/a>\u201d will lead to a lot of wreckage, but some things will be left standing and the breaking will itself be revealing and messy enough to convince people not to ask for more of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The second, and I think more reasonable prospect for hope, is that those on the receiving end of Trump\u2019s attacks include so many Americans and others around the world that new forms of resistance can and will become possible. Canada\u2019s<\/a> and Mexico\u2019s<\/a> leaders have shown the beginnings of this kind of resistance through their forceful responses to the tariffs. (I especially love my own British Columbia’s targeting of red-state produced liquor<\/a>; Ontario’s premier is considering a similar move. Blue states might start thinking about developing “blue-state certification” to be able to sell things to Canadians.) Even Canadian hockey fans showed their healthy response to Trump’s announcement by booing the U.S. national anthem<\/a> at a hockey game on the weekend. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hockey fans aside, Canada\u2019s politicians are speaking in a pretty single voice for the first time in years, demonstrating that an external threat — like hostile aliens landing on Earth — is the best unifier<\/a>. Meanwhile, Europe is still a very active battleground between institutionalists who, for all their weaknesses, maintain some semblance of functioning social democracy, and the far-right, Trump- and\/or Putin- aligned forces that challenge them. (Let’s leave aside the weaknesses of those social democracies for the moment. We can go back to criticizing them when the larger risk — of the varying forms of neo-fascism — isn’t so prominent.) Media are at least not decimated yet in Europe. And the rest of the world will have to judge for itself what it all means.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The real question is whether any such mobilization is possible in the trainwreck of our affective<\/a> and attention economies<\/a> — where everyone is so glued to our dystopian screens that we can hardly move ourselves out of our seats. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here it’s worth remembering that those behind the trainwreck — radical-right culture warriors, anti-government libertarians, and tech-bro oligarchs — are experiencing the jouissance<\/a><\/em> of their lives, gleefully speeding<\/a> through every stop sign and intersection with primal abandon, as they imagine the destruction of whatever bogeyman they believe held them back (women, blacks, minorities, urban elites and DEI warriors, the Deep State, the liberal world order, or whatever). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This suggests that now is not a time for meekly tut-tutting our disapproval. Shouting “coup!” and “fascism!” is also not be the best strategy. Consumers of right-wing media have long stopped taking those shouts seriously, and without substantive analyses, they start to ring hollow for everyone else. (But for some of those analyses, which remain crucial, see below.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What we do need is Aikido- or Jujitsu-style redirections of that energy. The question is how to do that effectively. Whatever else, it will require imagination and creativity. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Some go-to sources for up-to-date analysis of what’s happening<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here are some of the more prominent analytical voices of the \u201cresistance.\u201d Most of them are well-known center-left intellectuals who have taken it upon themselves to inform the public, often by starting their own substacks or other online newsletters. <\/p>\n\n\n\n