TRUMP’S populism is built from the algorithmic trackings of public opinion fluctuation overseen by Bannon and Cambridge analytics. That’s largely why he’s in the White House.
Capitalism being what it is, actual free trade policies would lead to the continued disenfranchisement of uncompetitive American business and labour by foreign competition. There are two forms of protectionism by which the USA has attempted to stem this trend.
One, the various global trade agreements, such as TTIP, etc., which enshrine the interests of corporate capital as prime legislation, handing over all arbitrations to internal, corporate decision. This has the effect of allowing U.S. Capital, as well as all international corporate interests, unlimited and risk-free lattitude in deploying their present capital reserves to fully monopolise all markets and drive out all competition.
Two, Bannon’s ‘economic nationalism’, which in effect does the same thing domestically. Lessening corporate deficits through tax cuts; creating the conditions for subcontractor/small business increase; these simple moves, whatever else they may do, ensure that U.S. corporate capital does not deplete. International trade is then arranged on a piecemeal basis, according to Trump’s ‘art of dealing’.
All of this is fairly innocuous and simple, but it neglects the unpopular military-industrial face of American business which Bannon; Trump, and his supporters; would rather ignore, in their dreams of a U.S. self-reliance, whose every international intervention is a magnanimous act of U.S. beneficence. To reflect this visage in America’s political mirror, would not only be to deny this dream of charitable autonomy; but it would be an explicit acknowledgement of the extent to which the USA configures, calculates, and controls; horror, injustice, and iniquity, around the globe.
No longer would this acknowledgement merely reside in oppositional rhetorics of the populist Left and Right; or in dispassionate political histories of the contemporary era. The discrepancy between mainstream, official declarations, and the leak of critique, has, with the ascension of Trump’s own indulgence in demonising the U.S. establishment from the White House itself, essentially collapsed that discrepancy.
The speeds characterising high frequency trading necessarily encourage acceleration of linked economic factors and processes, too. Political and media production, cannot help but reflect this. This, together with the hyper-visibility of the Internet, and the international polyvocity it enables; ensures that mainstream authorisation and its critical refutation occur almost simultaneously. In some cases, such refutations actually precede authorisations. Given this scenario, the traditional notion of an independent media reporting on autonomous political events no longer quite obtains. It’s not so much that representation and reference have entirely disappeared. Rather, all factors have collapsed into the singular momentum of pure eventuality, a sphere of self-caused ‘effects’ that mediates only itself, and is no longer susceptible to traditional linear explanations. Such explanations would have been reliant on the worldly distances between traditional categories. With the technological compression of those distances, creating a speed of events beyond the effective processing capacity of mass human reception; traditional categorisation, and the lineaments of world-building sense which it provides; has lost its purchase on eventuality and can no longer quite find the worlds of mundane yet reliable convention it once enjoyed. There is a twisting implosion in which the encoding embroidery of these conventions; the textile of the whole world; has become a mere ‘wet rag’ of reality, wrung ever tighter by Profit’s grip, in Finance’s quest to eke out every drop of unexploited value. This adventure of compressive desiccation, or desiccating compression, has reached the point where all liquidity has left this torso of conventional reality in torsion, dripping and disappearing into the virtuality of offshore, financial fictions. As further twisting tensions are applied, the fabric of reality begins to break, and the masses hang on to the weave of its nostalgia, by a thread. Noticeably fraying and unstitching, at the conclusion of this process not even a single patch of reality is left. In addition, it is no longer certain what is ‘loom’ and what is ‘weft’. For the empire of the real was not only clothed in the threads of imagination, but it was entirely built out of them, too.