ONE WAY TO MARK the combustion and decline of the American empire is to visit the memorial to its greatest president. Make it a bright but bitter day, as it was in the second week of January when I saw for the first time Abe Lincoln enthroned in his immense melancholy. Turn north in lowering light, and between the colonnades is the entire text of his second inaugural address – all six-hundred-and-ninety-six words of it, clipped fast into frozen marble.
Lincoln’s English owes much to the King James Bible; its incantatory patter, its circular clauses, its suitability for aphorism. In few mouths does its style sound anything but purple now. But we grant that tone to a man part-lawyer, part-parson, part-Promethean liberator. And here inscribed is Abe’s efficient history of a civil war he only late realised was a good thing for which terrible things had to be done. In his final months, with brave Union boys bloodying themselves in Petersburg trenches, Lincoln shouldered with reluctant fervour a kind of emancipatory violence: revolutionary violence, even, “until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword…”
Standing there in the frigid chill, reading through the whole thing, I chose sentiment over cynicism. I mourned Lincoln’s death, and the passing of Reconstruction which could, in the right conditions, have saved us from the mewling revenge the South continues to inflict on the Union 160 years later. If I had chosen cynicism, I might’ve remembered that earlier that same March day in 1865, Abe’s stinking compromise of a vice-president Andrew Johnson was so drunk (three table glasses brimmed with rye) he could barely hiccup his way through a speech, then had to be hauled from the platform because he was unable to swear in his own deputies. Beneath every beautiful peroration lies the muck of human folly and the vast forces of resentment. Beneath virtue, history sits waiting to ruin the punchline.
Here are your enemies, Trump says, and here is how they will be humiliated.
Whenever Donald Trump has to be propped up at a teleprompter, as he was on Monday during his second inauguration, the effect is much more boring than when he free-associates to a half-full stadium of baying loons. He can’t read very well, doesn’t trust in what’s written for him, and hates any infringement on his right to blow through a series of complaints about what he last saw on Fox News. But it has its use, when he judder-bars through “prepared remarks”, because it tells us something about what his coterie of family, advisers, and limpet-like hangers-on would like to believe about themselves, and about America. This was, he said, “liberation day,” a “revolution of common sense.” The decline is over, Trump swore, “sunlight is pouring over the entire world,” revealing the way to a “golden age.” It looks more like a new Dark Age, and it turns out that what they believe about themselves has been sifted from a puked-up spill of undigested cliché. Even Lorenzo Sewell, a Detroit preacher hand-trucked in to deliver the benediction, seemed to crib much of his howl from Martin Luther King’s (watered-down) 1963 speech delivered under Abe’s eternal gaze.
Yet Trump’s crowd – his people – rose dutifully and croaked like seals for the applause lines. The content of the address mattered much less than the general aura of celebration: triumph through collapse; victory amid the waning; a cheer and a new crown for the anointed head as the rising waters reach the eyeballs. Here was spectacle fit for a man who knows of nothing else. (“You’re gonna have a lot of fun watching television,” he said at a ‘victory rally’ one day prior). Indeed, the barrage of executive orders that came after were supposed to imply action, decisiveness, something happening at long last – a panacea to satisfy the Caesarist impulse, a cure for the laxity and weenie-ness of the Biden years. Movement, momentum, the appearance at least of grievances being soothed. Here are your enemies, Trump says, and here is how they will be humiliated. As always with this lot, the stupid mingles easily with the serious, the dumb with the dire. ‘Gulf of America’ and DOGE have to be parsed from the invigilation of trans people, mass deportation of immigrants, and the attempt to wreck the Fourteenth Amendment.
From “malice towards none” to malice for all. Are we really so far distant from the rule of a class who insist on “wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces”? The ceremony was dragged indoors, under the same Capitol rotunda treated as a playpen by fascists doing their best panto performance of The Turner Diaries four years ago (who will all, to a man, receive pardons). Supposedly it was too cold out, but shifting the carnival inside had two other effects. First: to finally nail dead, with the image of an empty National Mall, the idea of Trumpism-as-populism. Second, and relatedly: to cosy together the regime with its financiers.
Though hardly a harmonious bunch, the rich were rewarded for their newfound loyalty. Almost a decade ago, each of them joined in the near-unanimous rejection of Trump as an unstable menace to the interests of capital. Two years ago, Elon Musk wanted Trump to “hang up his hat and sail into the sunset” (to which the 47th replied that the South African should “drop to his knees and beg”). So here was Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos, arranged in a neat shooting-gallery row ready to assume the required position and do their duty. Slightly further along were Tim Cook of Apple and Sundar Pichai of Google. Lurking somewhere in the back was Bernard Arnault, boss of luxury slop-conglomerate LVMH, embodied proof that rich people have no taste – not even rich French people. Holding up the zionist end of the rope was Miriam Adelson, truly flourishing after her decrepit husband’s death and wearing – no lie – rose-tinted specs. (RFK Jr, meanwhile, drooled in the direction of the ceiling, and I’m not entirely sure the parasite brain-worm hasn’t taken control of his body again).
All the wind has gone out of the Democrats again. The principal divide between them and Republicans seems to be whether or not they prefer their facelifts to appear human or not.
Who is scratching whose back here? Is Trump their servant, or are they his? Both, I’m sure, think they are being paid the expected dues in the expected Washington manner: a steep price for a lent ear, flattery traded for access. Trump promised to kill the Green New Deal, a thing that never really existed but which symbolises the possibility of constraint and priorities other than the continued enrichment of a few – two things capitalists fear the most. And so they lined up to kiss the ring and wink. Now they get to squeeze the last drops of profitability before the true crisis – in energy, food, migration, or war – really bites harder. Their fealty is in defence of an astonishingly lame kind of hedonism.
That they once counted themselves in opposition but have now joined the faction in power is proof, if more were needed, that the one-party state is still a viable theory of American politics. All the wind has gone out of the Democrats again. The principal divide between them and Republicans seems to be whether or not they prefer their facelifts to appear human or not. Indeed, one creature on the dais seemed to have fallen into the same vat of corrosive chemicals as Kurtwood Smith at the end of Robocop. Certainly Joe Biden’s chirpy “Welcome home” when Trump arrived at the White House earlier in the morning was evidence enough that orderly, peaceful, democratic transitions of power continue to be the way one hand washes the other. “National unity,” Trump said, “is returning to America.”
How right he was, and what better way to celebrate that unity than with his bestest new friend throwing not one but two sieg heils. Compare and contrast the reaction from the mainstream right – equivocating, defensive, exculpatory – to that of actual Nazis, from Stormfront-users to the Proud Boys, who were nothing short of thrilled. “Sieg Heil?? Are we so back?” said one account on Musk’s platform. It got two million views. In this sense I cannot accept Abe Lincoln’s injunction not to judge lest we be judged. Judgement, in this moment of extreme powerlessness, is one of our few comforts, along with derision, insult, sneering, and condescension. Such happy contempt for these charlatans – and the charlatans who let it happen – might see us through the next few days. After that, we must set about repaying all that blood still being drawn by the lash.