Re: <nettime> Francine Prose: America feels like a country on the brink of an authoritarian takeover (TG)

[Felix Stalder via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

On 1/26/26 22:16, Brian Holmes via nettime-l wrote:
> The question, What is to be done*with these fascists* is definitely a good
> one. It follows the question, How can Trump be removed? that Ted posed
> about a year ago, asserting that*he will have to be removed*, which is
> true beyond doubt. I have thought about that question a lot in the
> intervening year.


My hunch is that he cannot be removed from the outside, I mean by forces 
outside his coalition of fossil industries, tech, and white 
nationalists. The power of the state to squash dissent, to arbitrarily 
change the rules are, to force rational institutions into submission, to 
declare the state of emergency (as all the podcast-Schmittians in his 
entourage are so eager for) is just too great. Maybe the Supreme Court 
is going to limit some of  the more capricious declarations of 
emergencies (tariffs), but I don't hold my breath.

But what about the coalition itself? The fossil industries are massive, 
but the economics are clearly tilting towards "renewable" energies. Not 
for environmental, but for technological and geopolitical reasons. And, 
yes, the US is a large market that can insulate itself, but it's an ever 
shrinking part of the global economy. Not even the full force of the US 
state can stop that. It can delay and make it more costly, but it feels 
like that tipping point has been passed. Even the Europeans announced 
today a new 100 GW wind power project. That's more energy than the UK 
produces and certainly much cheaper and much quicker than building the 
equivalent of 100 nuclear power plants. It's not even close. And the 
shock over Greenland might have provided them with some incentive not to 
back down again.

I find the contrast between the fossil empire (US) and the electric 
empire (China) to be a very useful way of framing how a lot of 
structural issues interrelate.

The tech industry is universally hated. Just read the comment sections 
of say, Breitbart on stories about Elon Musk or Tesla. There is no love 
there. But it brings in a lot of money and holds a lot of power. But it 
has bet everything on AI, and it's difficult to see how this bet can be 
sustained much longer. AI will stay, but trillion-dollar investments in 
assets that have a very short life span and for which there is no clear 
demand will bump, at some point, against a hard limit. If crypto falls 
into a winter in parallel, the knives will come out.

And the white nationalists? I don't know. They will not go away, but 
they are not a majority.

So, I think the changes that the coalition fractures are real, 
particularly if the AI motor stops pulling the economy.

But what then? It's clear that things will not go back; Biden tried to 
do that, and he failed; the conditions are just not there anymore.

I think the best shot is to build up and support those forces that 
aligned with the electric paradigm shift. It's still tech, but a 
different one, it's still minerals, but different ones.

And that's not only a technical questions but one that cuts across all 
sectors. And it needs the imagination that another world is possible, 
because the send of inevitability that fascism portrays (the law of the 
jungle is the true state of nature), is its most powerful weapon.











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