I was saved by God to Make America Great Again. – Donald Trump, Second Inaugural Address

MAGA — Make America Great Again. See also: palingenetic ultranationalism.

Capitalism is a ritual. Through quantification, comparison, and exchange, we reproduce patterns of en-habiting that re-shape the world in the image of capital. This is reification and fetishization — not propaganda or false consciousness, but the lived experience of simulated value, a Demiurgic realm where money replaces human activity. Insofar as we are engaged in the practices of capital, money has intrinsic value, similar to how, in engaging in the rituals of the ekklesia, the Eucharist becomes the body and blood of Christ. Rituals en-world, and this en-worlding habituates us to perceive reality through the refracting prism of those rituals. Money has value under capitalism in the same way that the throne and scepter have power under monarchy — because in living out the mythos of capital, its symbols are given a life of their own, transforming the world into a fun-house mirror of class domination.

Capital was born long ago, in the primordial soup of exchange and proto-state formation, but it began to move in the belly of modernity, a process of reduction hiding a reality of enclosure and re-territorialization. Modernity is a cult of quantity that slices the world into units of comparison, dis-joining parts from the whole and shifting the patterns of everyday life from the interwoven vibrancy of togetherness to the machinic fiction of the collective and from the sacred multiplicity of the Unique to the interchangeable gray matter of the individual. Modernity first tore into the world in the overlapping apocalypses of the Black Death, the colonization of the Americas, the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, and the Protestant Reformation. As Europe was pulled into the radical potential of peasant rebellions and the haunting specter of the medieval commune, the old feudal order allied with the rising bourgeoisie to construct and weaponize a new machinery of power: capital and colonialism, new names for the old evil of Empire. The European peasants were internally colonized, their livelihoods and culture crushed through enclosure, witch hunts, re-territorialized patriarchy, the violence of the post-Westphalian nation-state, and the lived necessity of wage-labor and debt. Proletarianization is not simply an economic process transforming subsistence agriculture into contract labor, but a psychic violence re-shaping the world of the peasantry into that of the proletariat, the inherently oppressed shadow of capital.

The engine behind this process is capital accumulation, the constantly expanding libidinal beast of extraction, exploitation, and the hoarding of value, one constructed through a process of reduction, quantification, and simulation. This creature is both economic and cultural, with the supposed barrier between the base and superstructure being nothing more than a fiction hiding the development of the social factory. We come to dwell in the world of capital, becoming mirror images of accumulation and exchange, interacting with one another on the basis of property, as zombified bodies commandeered by quantity. Socialism, nationalism, fascism, and liberalism are phantasmic movements that reflect this process, defending and propagating reduced and fetishized qualities — race, class, sex/gender, the state, The People, The Leader, etc. Whenever one fails, another enters to restart the engine of accumulation. Suppose the proles start to take over factories and build councils. In that case, there is always nationalism to divide them along spectral boundaries, fascism to brutalize them and force them into militarized industrial production, socialism to direct them towards defending the state rather than challenging it, and liberalism to accuse them of anti-democratic tendencies. The real movement, which Marx called communism and Bakunin anarchism, but which ultimately has no name, is one that lies outside of the system of idolatry and therefore is forced into heresy. In times of calamity, capital uncloaks itself to reveal itself as death, wielding war, pestilence, and famine as tools of inquisition against every new peasant rebellion. Every reaction comes with a death squad, who use steel and fire to re-gild the Golden Calf and feed the universe to Moloch, prostrating themselves before the blood cult of Empire.

These demonic forces come together in MAGA, the rotting ideology of American Caesarism. Race, nation, sex/gender, The People, The Leader, etc., all roar back into history to obscure the psychotic transformation of the American state into its necrotic shadow, the cartel. In fear of the opening created by the Covid Apocalypse, which fomented rebellion and a renewed labor movement, the tech toddlers bypass the ancien régime of state capitalism in favor of the patrimonial vision of an individual super-capitalist, the idiotic autocracy of Trump the First. Trump’s more “learned” supporters cover their cowardice with the slop of post-liberalism, garbling nonsense about how he inaugurates a new golden era, saving the US fro the decay and chaos of liberalism. This is the argument given by Michael Anton in “The Flight 93 Election,” where he compares 2016 to rushing the cockpit during a hijacking. It is also the logic underpinning Project 2025 and similar reactionary programs, professing republicanism while inviting Louis Bonaparte to take up residence in the White House. Trump indeed inaugurated a new world; however, it is not post-liberal but hyper-liberal. Trump is the summation of liberal capitalist modernity, a system that was never in opposition to nationalism and fascism (or its servants in the ranks of socialism), but symbiotic with them. He completes the reversal of values from the Unique to simulacra, subsuming flesh into raw power and breath into the accelerating circulation of imaginary capital. Trump is a devil in the most literal sense, a ruler of a self-created hell, a world marked by separation from God, the eclipse of the holy.

The gates of this hell are open, guarded by a flimsy paper Cerberus. The March of History comes and goes, but gives us nothing. Historical Materialism is thrown into the wastebasket of ideology. Abstraction and the Great Books of a collection of bleached cemetery statues will not save us from this creature. Instead, salvation is found here, in the world, with others — in the “real movement which abolishes the present state of things,” a movement of people rather than ideas. That movement has no name, a force that is irreducible, undefinable, and concrete, an ocean of Uniques joining together in playful creation, the death of one world and the birth of another. It is us against the idols and we have nothing to lose, because all the idolaters offer us is nothing.

The stinking puddle from which usury, thievery and robbery arises is our lords and princes. They make all creatures their property—the fish in the water, the birds in the air, the plant in the earth must all be theirs. Then they proclaim God's commandments among the poor and say, "You shall not steal."  - Thomas Müntzer, Letter to the Princes

Image: Three Flags by Jasper Johns (1958)