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u.s. imperialism
Nostalgia Won't Lead the US Out of the Trump Mire
The anomie and gloom that characterize the public mood as fascism threatens to attain consolidation and crush all dissent cannot be remedied by backward steps into the immediate neoliberal system that gave rise to Trump in the first place.
Mar 30, 2025
George Packer recently wrote an Atlantic piece that cleverly situated the Trump regime within a familiar Orwellian framework.
According to Packer, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.), and other slavish Trump sycophants have become comically ridiculous (Packer references Henri Bergson's theory of comedy) in direct proportion to their ability to absurdly and mechanically mimic President Donald Trump's perspective with the same rhetorical mannerisms that they had employed mere months ago to argue the exact opposite point of view. "Without missing a beat" they once spoke skillfully on behalf of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and now (in robotic fashion) they laud Russian President Vladimir Putin. They are stooges of the moment, laughable figures right out of the pages of 1984.
As Packer sees it, the old order of American NATO alliances had "made the past eight decades uniquely stable and prosperous in modern history." In his view the U.S. descent into realms of Orwellian mendacity originates with the antics of Trump and his lapdogs. Packer does not trace the U.S. embrace of dystopian culture to, say, renaming the U.S. military juggernaut the Department of Defense—an example of Orwellian deception far more confusing than playing a game of musical chairs with global alliances.
The schism between liberals and progressives hinges on whether or not one views Trump as an aberration, or a preordained end point of systemic failure.
Packer's calculus proposes that the danger of Trump stems from his power to humiliate and control his underlings in such a fashion that only he retains the ability to speak his mind, while all of the lesser accoutrements of the MAGA-sphere are reduced to being mechanized puppets.
I worry that many mainstream liberal pundits have made fascism into a Trump-centric formula—liberals like Packer betray nostalgia for past glories of American democracy and the world order that the U.S. largely controlled after WW II, and dominated almost completely after the Soviet fall. Like most instances of political nostalgia, this view depends on a myopic distortion. The uniquely prosperous and stable eight decades that Packer lauds were eight decades of war, regime change, colonial extraction, and—notably—eight decades of gathering extinction, environmental degradation, and skewed wealth.
We can either see Trump as a fracture in time, a great misfortune, a lightning bolt from hell intent on destroying a formerly beneficent arrangement of policies and alliances, or we can alternatively see Trump as a representation of American values—a mirror of the culture we created. The schism between liberals and progressives hinges on whether or not one views Trump as an aberration, or a preordained end point of systemic failure.
By the same token we might raise a skeptical eye at Packer's revisionist assessment of Secretary of State Marco Rubio and his passive discomfort as an extra in the theatrical meeting with Trump, Vice President JD Vance and Zelenskyy:
He sat mute throughout the Oval Office blowup while his principles almost visibly escaped his body, causing it to sink deeper into the yellow sofa. Having made his name in the Senate as a passionate defender of democracy and adversary of authoritarianism, he must have suffered more than others from the inner contortions demanded by the new party line—they were written on his unhappy face.
I have far more curiosity about the inner contortions that George Packer employed to rehabilitate Marco Rubio—a stick figure neocon with predictable views on corporately inflicted climate overheating (he doesn't believe in it), gun control (he doesn't believe in it), and abortion (he doesn't believe in it). The one thing that Rubio believes in with undeterred passion is war, and this, in Packer's view, makes him a "passionate defender of democracy and adversary of authoritarianism." Apparently, Rubio's enthusiasm for giving the authoritarian genocidaire, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a blank check for all the bombs of his dreams has no effect on Packer's assessment.
Rubio's constricted body language during the Trump-Zelenskyy showdown seemingly provides Packer with the pretext to assume that Republican capitulation to Trump conceals, in at least some instances, an internal moral crisis. It may be that Rubio had some sort of confused hiccup, a moment of puzzlement, as the story line shifted on a dime, or it may be that Rubio recoiled at his passive role, his mandate to be a mute walk-on in a drama that might have been more persuasive had he been excluded.
Packer gives himself license to fantasize about the allegedly tortured inner life of sycophants, and that troubles me. If we overly humanize Trump's henchmen and speculatively envision them as ambivalent victims of Trump's alleged mystical powers, we miss the seriousness of our predicament. U.S. politicians have been morally castrated as a matter of structural design, for, at least the eight decades of my lifetime. Trump can't be blamed for the vacuous surrender to corporate schemes that U.S. politicians dependably perform. Give Trump credit for exploiting the soulless dregs that he has surrounded himself with, but he did not drain the humanity from Marco Rubio. The moral desert that comprises the center of the former Florida senator resulted from a drought that long preceded Trump.
I believe that we have two real choices—capitulation or revolution.
Packer concludes his piece by asserting that the public view of the Russian-Ukraine conflict has not followed the narrative plot that Republican politicians newly embrace. The public still reviles Putin, and two-thirds of Americans (according to polls that Packer cites) want to continue to arm Ukraine. In Packer's view, America's public approval for arming Ukraine "might be America's last best hope." This misses the larger issue—how did the U.S. become a rapidly consolidating fascist country with politicians (centrist Democrats, neocons, libertarians, MAGA loyalists), all playing their preassigned bit parts?
The true masters of the system, the military industrialists and the corporate profiteers, lose nothing if the U.S. shifts alliances. The public support for Ukraine is little more than a lingering reflection of recent media perspectives. The public is always at the mercy of mass media and corporate control of information. In a country that has spent more money on military spending than the nine leading global competitors combined, the U.S. public still fails to react with alarm. Militaristic propaganda is at the heart of public control, and there are not even vestiges of antiwar passion detectable within the congressional body.
The anomie and gloom that characterize the public mood as fascism threatens to attain consolidation and crush all dissent cannot be remedied by backward steps into the immediate neoliberal system that gave rise to Trump in the first place.
A proposed withdrawal into the recent past of former President Joe Biden, or even former President Barack Obama (if it were even possible to do so—it isn't), condemns the public to accept a retreat into familiar safety—a set of governmental policies that the late David Graeber attributed to "dead zones of the imagination."
Graeber noted that:
…revolutionary moments always seem to be followed by an outpouring of social, artistic, and intellectual creativity. Normally unequal structures of imaginative identification are disrupted; everyone is experimenting with trying to see the world from unfamiliar points of view; everyone feels not only the right, but usually the immediate practical need to recreate and reimagine everything around them.
A true resistance to fascism would involve something more powerful than fatuous dreams about an idealized past. After all, superficial fantasies about the virtues of the past are Trump's shtick. I believe that we have two real choices—capitulation or revolution. The option of stepping meekly into the immediate past, as Packer proposes, will excite almost no one. This is a time—taking inspiration from David Graeber—for recreation and reimagining.
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Vance Calls Greenland 'Cold as Sh*t'—Just Like the Local Reaction to His Visit
Greenlanders are giving the administration of President Donald Trump—who renewed threats to take the Danish territory—the cold shoulder.
Mar 28, 2025
U.S. Vice President JD Vance, Second Lady Usha Vance, and two top Trump administration officials traveled to Greenland on Friday on an itinerary that was markedly curtailed from its original plans due to Greenlanders' frosty reception amid President Donald Trump's ongoing threats to take the Arctic island from NATO ally Denmark—even by armed force if deemed necessary.
Vance visited Pituffik Space Base—a U.S. Space Force installation on the northwestern coast of Greenland about 930 miles (1,500 km) north of the capital, Nuuk—with his wife, National Security Adviser Michael Waltz, and Energy Secretary Chris Wright.
The vice president's wife originally planned on a more interactive and cultural itinerary, including attending a dogsled race. However, Greenland's leftist government said earlier this week that is had "not extended any invitations for any visits, neither private nor official."
Compounding the Trump administration's embarrassment, U.S. representatives reportedly came up empty handed after canvassing door to door in Nuuk in an effort to drum up support for the visit. The administration denies this ever happened.
And so the Trump officials' audience was limited to U.S. troops stationed at Pituffik. After arriving at the base, the vice president told troops in the mess hall he was surprised to find the snow- and ice-covered Arctic island is "cold as shit."
"Nobody told me!" he added.
Vice President JD Vance and Second Lady Usha Vance visited a U.S. Space Force base in Greenland Friday. Vance is expected to receive briefings on Arctic security and address US service members.
Read more: https://t.co/1OIkkT3VnD pic.twitter.com/lbXeObJTgq
— Newsweek (@Newsweek) March 28, 2025
Getting down to more serious business, Vance said: "Our message to Denmark is very simple—you have not done a good job by the people of Greenland. You have under-invested in the people of Greenland and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this incredible, beautiful land mass."
Addressing Arctic geopolitics, Vance argued that "we can't just bury our head in the sand—or in Greenland, bury our head in the snow—and pretend that the Chinese are not interested in this very large land mass. We know that they are."
"The president said we have to have Greenland, and I think that we do have to be more serious about the security of Greenland," Vance continued. "We respect the self-determination of the people of Greenland, but my argument to them is: I think that you'd be a lot better coming under the United States' security umbrella than you have been under Denmark's security umbrella. Because what Denmark's security umbrella has meant is effectively they've passed it all off to brave Americans and hoped that we would pick up the tab."
This follows remarks earlier this week from Vance, who said during a Fox News interview that Denmark, which faithfully sent troops to fight in both Afghanistan and Iraq—43 of whom died, the highest per capita casualty rate of the alliance—is "not being a good ally" to the United States.
Asked by reporters on Friday if the U.S. would ever conquer Greenland by military force, Vance said he didn't think that would be necessary.
However, just a day earlier, Trump—who on Friday posted a video highlighting defense cooperation between the U.S. and Greenland—said his administration will "go as far as we have to go" to acquire the island, which he claimed the United States needs "for national security and international security."
It was far from the first time that Trump—who has also threatened to take over parts or all of countries including Panama and even Canada—vowed to annex Greenland, and other administration officials have repeated the president's threats.
"It's oil and gas. It's our national security. It's critical minerals," Waltz said in January, explaining why Trump wants Greenland.
The U.S. has long been interested in Greenland, and while the close relationship between the United States and Denmark has been mostly mutually beneficial, it has sometimes come at the expense of Greenland's people, environment, and wildlife.
Such was the case when a U.S. Air Force B-52 bomber laden with four thermonuclear warheads crashed into the sea ice of Wolstenholme Fjord in 1968. The accident caused widespread radioactive contamination, and the nuclear fuel components of one of the bombs remain unrecovered to this day.
Elected officials from across Greenland and Denmark's political spectrum expressed alarm over the Trump administration's actions.
Outgoing Greenland Prime Minister Múte Bourup Egede earlier this week
called Vance's trip "highly aggressive" and said that it "can in no way be characterized as a harmless visit."
"Because what is the security advisor doing in Greenland?" Egede asked. "The only purpose is to show a demonstration of power to us, and the signal is not to be misunderstood."
Danish Foreign Minister Lars Løkke called Vance's remarks on Friday "a bit inappropriate," adding that maybe the Trump administration "should look at yourself in the mirror too."
"When the vice president.. creates an image that the only way Greenland can be protected is by coming under the American umbrella, so you can say that Greenland is already there," Løkke elaborated. "They are part of the common security umbrella that we created together with the Americans after the end of World War II called NATO."
"We have always looked at America like the nice big brother to help you out and now it's like the big brother is bullying you."
Ordinary Greenlanders and Danish residents of the island were not happy about the Trump delegation's visit.
Anders Laursen, who owns a local water taxi company, toldNBC News that "we have always looked at America like the nice big brother to help you out and now it's like the big brother is bullying you."
Nuuk resident Marie Olsen said of Vance, "I think he's a big child who wants it all."
In the Danish capital Copenhagen, hundreds of people rallied Friday against the U.S. delegation's visit to Greenland. One protester decried what she called the U.S. administration's "mafia methods."
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Crime of the Century: An Old Soundtrack to Our Current Nightmare
How Supertramp’s 1974 prog-rock anthem foreshadowed 2025’s catastrophe.
Mar 16, 2025
Listening to Supertramp’s album Crime of the Century in 2025 is like dusting off an old diary and realizing you were right about everything.
Supertramp’s 1974 prog-rock anthem was not meant to be trapped in a decade drowning in idealism. Rather, it was a collection of elegies that resonate with me more now, in our current nightmare, than when I first listened to it. The mournful melodies and plaintive lyrics (by Richard Davies and Roger Hodgson) speak of the crises of vague spiritual thirst, self-loathing, money culture, schools churning out compliant citizens, and unabashed corruption.
It came to a head in the 2025 inauguration of an American president with the grand unveiling of a well-worn power system but with a staggering level of audacity. Near the president and out of the shadows, there stood magnates of seemingly incurable hubris who reached their bliss points, invited to take reign of sensitive policy and firing authority and gain access to the country’s secrets and public money. A new administration wasted no time unveiling a “billionaires’ row” of insatiable elites who aren’t just playing the game. They own it. Collectively worth $1.35 trillion, they have become brands in human flesh, more recognizable than the corporate empires they built.
The new administration did not emerge out of a vacuum. It is more of a political continuum than a rupture.
And somehow, it’s all there… in the album.
Four years after its release, I came across Crime of the Century in a used album store on the main strip of Carbondale, Illinois, during my undergraduate years at Southern Illinois University. Every other week or so, I’d walk to the music store that always smelled like stale cannabis and was managed by a large man with cannabis-stained teeth and a lot of opinions. He was clearheaded enough to have promised me that he’d keep an eye out for Supertramp cassettes and vinyls.
Back in the apartment, I had Crime on repeat for longer than I will confess. Somewhere in the silage of existential angst, I decrypted the pangs that augured the coming of a novel strain of corruption and indifference capable of shaking the moral foundations of anything in its path, including a nuked-up, power-bloated country, exulting in its hegemonic dominance, yet hanging on to conceits of global moral leadership.
There were plenty of suspects to point fingers at back in the 70s, but the hardest part—which the album still dares us to do—was staring down ourselves, we the self-satisfied searchers, critics, and activists with bell-bottoms, inebriated by our magical thinking of independence and convincing ourselves that we were above the detritus and contributed nothing to the collective rot. You’ll find this indictment in the concluding lines of the title track, “Crime of the Century”:
Who are these men of lust, greed, and glory?
Rip off the masks and let’s see
But that's not right, oh no, what’s the story?
Look, there’s you and there's me
I can’t say I saw today’s condition coming when I was 20. But it does seem close to a kind of Bayesian reasoning, where you have an initial, under-substantiated certitude about something and then see new evidence that confirms your most primitive claims and worries.
The new administration did not emerge out of a vacuum. It is more of a political continuum than a rupture. Former President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, and Vice President Kamala Harris have exited the stage, but their hollow-point scruples remain contagious, repurposed by their successors. What we are witnessing is not a change in direction but a seamless handoff, a continuation of the same imperial prerogatives, now dressed in different rhetoric.
The Oval Office openly covets resources and land that belong to other people. The perverse logic of supremacy and strange level of entitlement (epistemic assumptions of Empire) are rubber-stamped by compromised elected and appointed men and women of Pharaonic arrogance, who have narcissistic visions of taking Gaza’s seashore and gas fields, Greenland’s minerals, Canada’s lumber and oil, Ukraine’s massive rare earth reserves, and Panama’s canal.
So do we need more proof of active colonial appetites?
The existential dread of Crime of the Century should have shown us an imp squatting on the chest of a defeated counterculture that my generation thoughtlessly held on to. The costumes and performance of rebellion ultimately became products themselves, mass-packaged and sold back to consumers, as the edited book Commodify Your Dissent painfully argued a bit too late in 1997. To identify with grunge or goth moods, for example, subsequent generations purchased the look from fashion brands who created inventories, price points, and a market that preyed on real feelings of alienation and disillusionment in youth culture.
At the heart of Crime of the Century is a troubling accusation: We’re complicit in the corruption we claim to despise. It’s easy to cast blame on political elites, but the rot runs deeper. Media personalities, especially the high-profile journalists of broadcast celebrity and late-night comics, make their careers selectively criticizing these very figures and what they represent—only to rub shoulders with them at off-camera galas, clink wine glasses, invite them onto their shows, and turn critique into entertainment.
Each day, the celebrity reporters and broadcasters spew hundreds of thousands of words to demonstrate their erudition, apparently depleting their allotment of verbiage for the day, leaving no room for “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing.”
The oligarchs of influence thrive because, in part, we fund them. We engage the platforms, consume and share the storylines, and chase virality. We freely give away the inventories of our privacy. We do this knowing that the details of our inner sanctums are the products that social media giants are trafficking for great profit. The hard truth is, no one’s fully off the grid. We’re entangled in the wires we trip over and then curse at them like podcasters.
So, what do we do? Keep spinning the album and nervously thumb prayer beads (misbaha, in colloquial Arabic), cowering in the album’s pastel and gloomy brilliance?
With the exception of those who dared to speak truth to power (mainly through alternative presses that captured the right kind of radical), my generation watered the tillage that sprouted our current conundrum. One of the tracks of Crime exposed many for what they were: “For we dreamed a lot / And we schemed a lot / And we tried to sing of love before the stage fell apart.” That’s right, we were cantors of phantom ideals that were about to fall apart early in the 1980s, when John Lennon was murdered in New York City and Ronald Regan sired trickle down economics, which “foolishly trusted the collective greed of a people” to care for the needy and marginalized.
Songwriters like Cat Stevens, Bob Dylan, and Rick Davies, along with scholars like Christopher Lasch, sounded the alarm early, but most of us dismissed it, assuming the warning had to be for someone else. In his 1979 book The Culture of Narcissism, Lasch saw through the cracks of idiot-proof idealism and noticed the shape of social and psychological narcissism that soon enough would be given the key to the Oval Office.
My generation’s surviving tenants need to stop lecturing and stop recounting imagined glories of the past. It’s time to move out of the way, especially for the generation of young people now whom we bitterly complain about, but who actually are better positioned to succeed where we failed. They have ideals but are not idealists, and they are jaded, but not overly so, just enough. Former and current students of mine, they are not content with just listening. With hunger and the right kind of impatience, they will write new songs. Can’t wait to hear them, for if we’re still noticing the crimes of 1974 in 2025, it can only mean the crime never stopped. It just learned to dress better.
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