<nettime> It's the Sleaze, Stupid: How International Opinion Can Save the US Midterms and Democracy Itself

[Max Herman via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

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Acclaimed historian Martin Jay has written persuasively on the Frankfurt School's insights into the role of organized crime (literally and figuratively) in the rise of European fascism in the 1920's, and how many similar dynamics permeate the rise of American fascism in the 2020's.  We should take heed, as anyone who read last week's headlines (or the week before or the week before) can clearly see.

In his 2017 essay "The Age of Rackets" Jay draws clear comparisons between say Mussolini and the presently-in-decline and formerly-conservative US party which controls all three branches.

The lesson Jay offers is very clear: personal peaceful protest, which brings real risk to one's own financial profits, is the best way to oppose the takeover of everything by the worst.  It's what worked in the sixties, and virtually every other tactic only strengthens the far right.  (The proof of this is what they encourage and provoke, using all methods, and what they so desperately seek to suppress.)

This is why the current administration in 2026 is tearing down art and science as rapidly as possible, just like their Euro-precursors did in 1926.  They need to decimate and nullify every voice of protest in order to prevail, and gutting federal budgets for art and science is easy pickings.  Legitimate elections this November are next on the chopping block, but even a compliant SCOTUS can only go so far without exceeding its mandate.

Individual peaceful protest using what's left of the free public sphere of communication is the most important barrier to complete far-right autocracy, and this applies to the midterms especially.  Unfortunately both progressives and moderates have allowed their skill in using this method to atrophy badly under a false sense of safety that made them complacent as they dwelt in the fog of computerized fantasy.

They both have to regain their skills, and fast.

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How can regular people, talking to each other at parties and coffee shops and posting to their chat-feeds and list-boards, defend the 2026 US midterms and restore some level of check and balance?

We need to unite the opposition groups, and with a message that is both effective and inclusive.  Splintered, despondent, and acrimonious we cannot win back the House and Senate.  United, we can.

What can unite us, fast, this week?  I'd say Jay tells us: call out the sleaze factor.  Call it for what it is, the abject apotheosis of sleaze.  Rotten crony capitalism dressed up as free markets (ludicrously so).  Every form of sleaze, too numerous to list.  Boil it down to its essence, the "military despotism of a victorious demagogue" (as Hamilton put it in Federalist 85) whose control over his minions and worshippers is a religious orthodoxy of sleaze-militant.

There's no time to waste though, because their giant bag of dirty tech and tricks is about to be unleashed.

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The alternative to sleaze has always been the same: decent hard-working people, artists and scientists, those who practice spirituality with tolerance and interfaith dialogue and work collaboratively toward peace.  These are who the sleaze-bros attack first and foremost with their algorithmic piles of dark money.

This is what the ordinary writing of regular people (like me and you) has to defeat.  It's been done before and must be done again, now.

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But how could any kind of writing or ideas take shape fast enough, that hasn't already taken shape, to affect the midterms?  Well, don't underestimate how fast ideas can take shape.  They can be very fast.  Plus the same internet that conducts surveillance and brainwashing for the technoligarchs' right wing agenda can carry human writing too.  "Fast and furious are the words of sincere reform," as Tolkien said.

What's needed, ironically, is simplicity.  The Achilles' heel of progressives and moderates to be sure, but not beyond possibility.  But how?

Again, the past can swoop in to save us.  The same exact fascism we see today was on offer in 1788, the evil stew of warlordism and slavery, when Hamilton was trying to get the Constitution ratified.  He pointed out the extreme sleaze (they called it "unprincipled self-interest" back then) which was arrayed against any type of constitution whatever.  His closing argument, in the last paragraph of Federalist 85 (the last paper), couldn't be clearer nor more of a chiastic reference to the first paragraph of Federalist 1 (the first).  Both call upon one simple word to guide the nation:  EXPERIENCE, in all caps even, repeated multiple times.  Past present and future.

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After all, experience proper is the one thing even Ai computers do not have and cannot do, ever.  Jaron Lanier wrote a book about it, titled "Information is Alienated Experience."  Experience is inclusive; it is international; it admits of both the individual and the group, the one and the many.  It evolves, teaches, and learns.  One may fairly consider it the living tissue of human adaptation itself.  It is democratic, and without democracy it withers.  Some have compared it to rivers.

It's also been written about a lot, for centuries if not millennia, as a better option for "Western thought" than its two elder siblings (well younger really, but bullies all the same) Reason (rationality, instrumental and algorithmic) and Authority (power, violence, the sword).  Dante wrote about experience as "experientia" and "esperienza," making its importance central to the entire modern European reform movement since day one, and it is also the basis of neurophenomenology by Varela and many others.  As the great Shunryu Suzuki wrote in "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind," what is needed is "Experience not Philosophy."

In other words all human writers of conscience in every nation and every language need to align on the message that we want a global community and politics that values experience in the truest sense over sleaze (which is the false image of experience designed to deceive and oppress, for unscrupulous gain, as Machiavelli formulated).  Vine Deloria wrote, "If time becomes our primary consideration, we never seem to arrive at the reality of our existence in places but instead are always directed to experiential interpretations rather than to the experiences themselves."  James Austin closed his latest book with this sentence:  "By way of reassurance to those who enjoy reading, such a journey [that of 'odaiji ni'] still includes reading books about Zen, especially where they encourage the perspective that direct experience is more useful than words."

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Since time is of the essence, you could ask your Ai, if there is one you trust enough and your own writing and that of your friends is otherwise occupied, to write this "ethos of experience restored" for you.  It could probably do so easily in an evening.  Just give it the prompts -- Blake, Montaigne, Jay, Bataille, Dante, Macfarlane, Anni Albers, Benjamin, Tokarczuk, and Pamela Smith -- it's certainly read and "learned" them all -- and it will write a draft for you or even a whole shelf of drafts.

Then you can go from there, should you wish.  (I'd recommend just running with the prompts yourself and leaving the Ai to others, but my recommendation should probably be taken with a grain of salt.)

Remember too that only those who learn from experience can avoid repeating unnecessary world wars.  To learn, we must study, or at least pay attention, to experience as Hamilton said.  If the whole world, Americans and Chinese and everyone else helping them, articulates this simple basic message we can skip the inane Second Cold War on offer and all its attendant misery, wastage, and loss as never before.  If your Ais' writings are not good enough to bring that about I can send you my own four books (non-Ai-literature) for free, including "The World Novel" copyright 2025, in which some ideas may be found.  Ironically since those are not published the Ais do not yet have the benefit of their contents, that is to say their beneficial contents which are probably not without unbeneficial accompaniments.  C'est la vie.

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A song, a cartoon, a short meditation, a t-shirt, interviews with Ken Burns and Martin Jay, and a feature film currently in production -- these can also all be part of a fast change to unite progressives, moderates, and conservatives of conscience around a midterm agenda calling for checks and balances to the lunacy of Drumpfian grift, technophrenological hogwash, and blunders unlimited.

Yet without international voices tuning themselves, as it were, to the shared concept of experience, it is unlikely American writers alone can break through the avalanche of dark money and algorithmic baloney backing two more years of Drumpf unchecked and unbalanced.  We need the world's help.

Sometimes it is only what becomes a news story abroad that reaches the domestic audience.


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