Idiot Joy Showland

I’m going to be voting for Labour.

This is a new experience for me. It’s not that I haven’t voted Labour before: I did in 2010. Posturing and frightened in a low, scuzzy student block in Leeds, I pulled myself out my personal bathysphere of weed stink and late-teenage ripeness to plod over under crows and clouds and do my duty and keep out the Tories – and afterwards I felt deeply ashamed. It was like having one of Gordon Brown’s hairs stuck in my mouth; it was as if his grease had started oozing through my skin. I felt suddenly complicit in everything – the wars, the privatisations, the ASBOs and ID cards, the scudding lies and shabby gloss of New Labour Britain. Five years of Tory government acid couldn’t burn off the guilt. I promised myself that I wouldn’t ever do it again, and when I had the chance two years ago, I didn’t.

I couldn’t bring myself to do it. It’s not that they were just as bad as the Tories; the government had been a half-decade horror. a cast of seepy flesh-bubbles bloating out the mire, some murderous gang of ninnying imbeciles and swill-fed ponces that had, for all the usual reasons, decided theirs was the right to go about making life quantifiably, measurably worse. I hated them and I wanted them gone. But I couldn’t vote for Labour. I couldn’t stand hearing Ed Miliband’s voice on the radio, because it was the honk and bleat of someone who was basically just like me, another nice left-wing Jewish boy from North London, a bit clumsy, a bit gangly, a bit insecure – but one who didn’t indulge in my purism, or my nihilism, or whatever it was that made me refuse compromises and triangulation and any attempt to make common ground with established power. Any student of history knows what power does to the commons. I would not settle for the least worst option; I would not pick sides in the stupid intra-capitalist squabbles of electoralism. I knew that a Labour government would materially reduce the suffering and deprivation of millions of people – but I also knew that once you let that turn into an ethical duty to vote, anything beyond the minute reduction of suffering is lost, and worst of all, the suffering of others (migrants, asylum seekers, the global working class) becomes something utterly hideous: a worthwhile price. When I voted for some tiny Menshevik party I didn’t really like and whose name I can’t even remember, it didn’t help anybody. But who says our capacity to help, to do politics, to be engaged, has to be bounded by the form of the vote?

Since then things have become immeasurably worse, but that’s not why I’m voting for Labour. Britain is not just sliding into fascism; we’ve landed. This has become a deeply ugly place. Our Prime Minister – gurning, grimacing, parochial,  incompetent, rhadmanthine, segmented, arachnid, and inhuman; the Daily Mail letters page given chitinous flesh; a zealous ideologue for the doctrines of smallness and stupidity and dumbfuck blithering hatred; a vicar’s daughter distilling all the common-sense peevishness and resentment from the dingy grog of the English national spirit; a leader who doesn’t so much impose austerity as embody it, in every word or gesture that seeks to foreclose on all possibilities and draw the furthest boundaries of the sunlit world no further than your respectable lace curtains – instructs the public to give her more power, to paint over a divided country with a false unity in Parliament, so she can exercise her supreme will. The loyal Tory press responds with terrifying outbursts against all enemies: ‘Hang The Lot,’ ‘Boil The Traitors Alive,’ ‘Insert The Pear Of Anguish Into The Anuses Of Our Enemies So That They May Be Disembowelled From Within,’ ‘Readers Agree: It’s Time To Crush The Heads Of The Remoaners Under A Large Millstone,’ ‘Where Are Our Common-Sense Torture Kennels In Which The People We Don’t Like Are Torn Apart Shred By Shred By Starving Dogs?’ All the anti-establishment energies that fuelled the Brexit vote have been effortlessly consumed by the administration: the people had their say, and (given that this is all out of the Schmittian playbook) they will only get to have it once; now it’s the role of power to implement it, and the will of the people as refracted through this government is for total centralised power with anything that could be called political extinguished. This is fascism: a simple, easy, descriptive term for what it is we’re living under.

But I’m not voting against Theresa May. I’m voting for Jeremy Corbyn.

It’s easy, very easy, to be against something. I was against Labour in 2015, and I still don’t think I was wrong. But being purely against – anti-fascist, anti-liberal, anti-racist, anti-sexist – means never being let down, and never being vulnerable. The horrors of the world descend on you, and you oppose them. But it’s not enough. There needs to be some positively articulated shared object, something that can be affirmed. It means losing some cynicism, giving up some of the invulnerability of ironism, attaching the boundless subjective I to a thing of history, that could get swept up with every other fragile thing and destroyed. But without that attachment nothing can be done. This is why so many socialists still see a value and an importance in maintaining some kind of attachment to the old dead Soviet project – people who know full well that there were famines and purges, mass deportations and mass shootings, and who are repulsed by all suffering, but who know that, whatever its failings, the Soviet project was our project. Socialism is not an abstraction or a negation; it’s the real attempt to build a better world in this one, and it demands our fidelity. It won’t be possible unless we’re prepared to do more than oppose the evil. Demands are made on us for the sake of a liberated existence, and the first is that we be prepared to make ourselves vulnerable, and that we accept that our faith might be disappointed.

To be for Jeremy Corbyn is dangerous, and the possibility of disappointment is high. His ideology is not the same as mine; his policies, while good, are disarticulated; his leadership, while inspiring, has not been effective; most of all, the Labour Party might be the worst vehicle possible for a programme of genuinely egalitarian change. It doesn’t matter. If he loses, the suds and mediocrities of the party’s right wing will be relentless; if they manage to force back the leadership, they will go to work destroying absolutely anyone who still holds the belief that life can be made better, burying the idea in its fringes for another generation or more, rooting out the seeds of utopia wherever they’re planted. The Labour party will be refashioned into something that once again proposes Tory policies using Tory methods and with priorities, just as the Tories skid further into authoritarianism – but while the Tories will just flatly tell us that they do evil because that’s how things are, Labour will still be begging to have a go on the torture kit so they can make things better. And people might believe them. After all, it won’t be quite as bad as the alternative.

Corbyn stands for a refusal to accept something that’s just not quite as bad as the alternative. Corbynism means not just electing the least fascist, the least liberal, the least racist, and the least sexist. The Labour right, the Tories, the Lib Dems, and Ukip are all partisans of a restricted imagination and a penny-pinching common sense; Corbynism the possibility of something actually good, the possibility of a way out. It points beyond itself.  Jeremy Corbyn did something quietly incredible, and which has nothing to do with his actual performance as Labour leader: he acted as the signifier that brought together a collectivity, he formed a point of unity for everyone who wanted a radical and transformative social change, even if they didn’t agree on what it should look like or how to bring it about. He gave the left a space to assert itself openly in British politics, in surprising numbers. This – the collective, not the man – is what’s important, and what’s feared, and what our enemies are desperate to crush.

After all, it wasn’t meant to be like this. There is a programme now for Western politics: it’s what we saw last year in the United States, and what’s unfolding right now in France. Wets versus Nazis, the collapsing liberal order against the embodiment of its own internal collapse, reiterated over and over again in every country, politics as a looping gif, the juddering replay at the end of the world. No hope, no possibility, this or the abyss. The radical left still has a role to play: its role is to lose. You thought you could have something better, and it turns out that you can’t: now choose. Centrists are obsessed by the idea that radicals secretly prefer the fascists to themselves; as soon as the hope for anything better is extinguished they demand that everyone on the left loudly announce how much they prefer the status quo to the remaining alternative. We have to pick sides in what is essentially a family squabble among reactionaries. Isn’t Hillary Clinton better than Donald Trump? Isn’t Mark Rutte better than Geert Wilders? Isn’t Emmanuel Macron better than Marine Le Pen?

Yes, of course they are. However badly things are going, they could always get worse. But the final collapse of liberalism is a situation in which liberalism seems perversely comfortable. Anti-fascism is only one half of what the world needs; it also needs a positively articulated vision of how it can be improved, and the centrists have nothing: lower business rates, softer racism, friendlier faces. Of course it’s necessary – urgently, frantically necessary – to defeat the Nazis, not least because it buys us more time. But it’s not enough, it’s a stopgap for the symptoms. Almost all the advanced capitalist societies are tilting in the same direction, and these Nazis didn’t come from nowhere. They are entirely immanent to the liberal political order as it stands; their racism and violence and hatred comes from a society which is already racist and hateful and violent. The fascists gain their energy from the failure of liberalism, and liberalism gets to stave off its failure thanks to the threat posed by the fascists. Both are the living undeath of the other. The whole order is monstrous, decrepit, shambling, and lifeless; it has to go. To struggle for a better world isn’t a luxury in a time of rising fascism, it’s the only thing that can save us.

I’m voting for Labour. It’s not perfect, of course it’s not. And Labour are unlikely to win. Corbynism or barbarism doesn’t represent a fork in the road, but something much harder; barbarism surrounds us everywhere, and Corbynism is attempting to wrench us out of it; it’s hard to pull an entire planet out of the swamp it’s made for itself, it’s hard to lift something up when it’s already slipping down, it’s hard to tear yourself away from a brutal and stupid reality. But it can be done. Something like Corbynism was never meant to happen. The narrative failed here: where there should have been a brief entrancing spark of hope followed by another grim round of which-is-worse centrism-or-fascism, that spark refused to be snuffed out. It’s burning lower than I’d like, but it’s still there, and while it is, I’m voting for Labour.

Corbynism or barbarism, part I, written during the last Labour leadership election, is here.

Donald Trump ordered his attack on Syria because of something he saw on TV. The world is full of people like him: old, shabby, pompous; people who know everything because they learned it all from somewhere, people who function as exit nodes for the vast extraorganic network of information that chatters across oceans and ping-pongs through outer space, people who form the anuses of the system of images, excreting their content back into the world of things, people who repeat everything they see on TV. Every suburban bus stop shelters a Donald Trump, some smugly witless man of the world who knows what he knows and knows it better than you, some tyrant-in-waiting ready at any moment to vomit up the whole of the received wisdom in one splattering stream, and then act like they’re in possession of some special knowledge because they’re able to do so. The only difference is that when Donald Trump blathers from the TV, the TV takes notice: he repeats what it says, it repeats what he says. Donald Trump is the network whorling in on itself; the system of careful mediation finally splayed out in the mud, legs out, back twisted, licking its own arsehole.

The media was kind to Trump’s attack on Syria. Every pompous outlet that has spent the last five months screaming incessantly about the threat to democracy, the inevitable deaths and the terror of wars, had nothing but applause as soon as the wars and the deaths actually got going. A fleshy and dangerous idiot, a vulgarian, an imbecile – until those first perfect screaming shots of Tomahawk missiles being fired were broadcast – that’s our guy, you show them Donny! This is when, as Fareed Zakaria put it on CNN, Trump ‘became the president.’ And he really is presidential now, because the president is a totemic war-chief, the bloated repository of every male fantasy that had to be repressed, someone whose only job is to look like they could kill a hundred people in the morning and pose for a photoshoot with their dogs in the afternoon. Never mind the deaths or the uncertain repercussions; Trump’s strike was utterly squalid and utterly ignoble, some fattened toddler idly shitting out molten steel into the parched graveyard that used to be Syria, saving nobody, helping nobody, thoughtless and obscene. Kill a few of their guys, teach them a lesson, it’s common sense. And all the sophisticates and strategists applaud – stricken by half-hearted guilt, of course; after all, you still wouldn’t want to have the man round for dinner. They write their long justificatory exegeses on the timeliness of the act, bringing out every little rhetorical trick of the educated ruling classes, because all their moral angst is also from comic books, and cinema, and TV.

On NBC, Brian Williamss, ranting himself into ecstasy, quoted Leonard Cohen: I am guided by the beauty of our weapons. What weapons guide? Cohen wasn’t singing about clubs or spears or missiles, but ideology, culture, and fame. Mediation. Whether he knew it or not, what Brian Williams was saying had nothing to do with the spotlit plumes of white smoke rising from the US Navy vessels in the Mediterranean. The beautiful weapon was himself. the beautiful weapon was TV.

Beyond the fiddly cloisters of the media intellectuals, why do Americans love their wars so much? Because war is the only workable substitute for being able to turn off the TV. Wars happen for the same grim and venal reasons that have always made the rich massacre the poor, but every other weapon is now subordinated to the screens, the nightly news and the outrage on Twitter. The media transmits the relentless horror of the world, sliced up into edible segments: here’s a problem, here’s a tragedy, here’s an atrocity, here’s something else. Chemical weapons, starvation, murder, war. All of it is shrink-wrapped and isolated; you can never really find out why this is happening, no more than you could really learn the long sad stories behind every neatly packaged item on the supermarket shelves. They don’t even need to lie, although they do that too; the propaganda is in the medium itself. And the ethical response to all this diffuse suffering, charging at your face out of nowhere, is no longer why is this happening? but we have to make it stop. Anything is permissible if it’ll just make this go away. There’s no better example than the 2000 film Rules of Engagement: our heroic Marines are called in to defend the US Embassy in Yemen from an angry crowd outside, and all the time they’re there we can constantly hear their endless and repetitive chants, and the camera flashes between shots to glimpses of furious mouths with terrible third-world teeth, furious, inhuman, a slow torture, until the good patriotic viewer is begging our heroes to just shut them up. After the Marines fire into the crowd, there’s a moment of perfect silence. Bliss.

The attack on Syria will not make its war go away. Every primly disgusted apologia for the attack is a travesty. So Assad should be able to use chemical weapons with impunity? So we should do nothing? See how that we slips in there, almost unnoticed. Is this the same we that killed 56 Syrian civilians in Manbij last year, and then 46 in rural Aleppo, and then nearly 300 innocent Iraqis in Mosul? The we that turned the Korean peninsula into rubble and carnage because the people there wanted a better life, and then Indochina, and then the Middle East; the one that’s currently engaged in starving millions in Yemen? What happened to Libya, after we were told we had a responsibility to save the civilians there too? This isn’t ‘whataboutery,’ but a simple question: when judgement and punishment are carried out by the same people, who gets to judge? If the Syrian government carried out the chemical weapons attack in Khan Sheikhoun then it is monstrous, cynical, and murderous – but the ability to punish monstrous states seems to belong only to the most powerful; in other words, the most monstrous, the most cynical, and the most violent. But all it needs is a we – a word reaching through the screen to swaddle you up in it – for the great roving predator of the world, dripping with blood from every pore, to become something else: the international community, the ones who must intervene, to protect the children.

The next attack won’t stop the war in Syria either, or the next one. That’s not what these things are for. The response from the Mail on Sunday’s Dan Hodges was instructive. Bomb Assad, he said, and then bomb Isis. And when that leaves what was once a functioning society in the hands of Jabhat al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham? ‘Then we go and get them too.’ After all, if every Syrian is dead, then the war is finally over. Their suffering is immense, but it’s not their suffering that matters: it’s the suffering of the viewer, at home, heartbroken as they watch the carnage playing out onscreen. It doesn’t matter who does it, and it doesn’t matter how it’s done, but we need to turn it off forever.

The collective noun for issues of the Evening Standard is a plague. These things should be dead, pulped and bleached to nothing, but watch how they move. Like any parasite, it never crawls around under its own power. The Evening Standard, folded in half to form a coward’s carapace, skitters about in the wind on its pointed pages, tapping in darts and pounces along the Tube-station kerbside between fag-ends and plastic bags. After it rains the water glugs upwards through an overflowing sewer, and the Evening Standard sprawled lazy over the grate rises and falls, seepages of grime-stained rainwater passing over the warping lines of text and sinking back down again; it’s found its power, it’s breathing. On the escalators the Evening Standard waits, great snowdrifts of the Evening Standard piling against the rails, to moulder and soften until it’s ripe. The Standard swarms on the carriages, waiting just behind your neck; the distracted millions pick it up and leave it somewhere else, spread its spores across the city, bring it into their homes. Assume that half of the Standard‘s daily circulation of 850,000 is zooming around on the Tube at any given time: all together, the newspaper is moving at nearly nine million miles per hour; over the course of a working day, plus an hour’s commute each way, the Evening Standard plunges the distance from London to its faint anaemic sun. Imagine if the city were stripped, like Calvino’s Armilla, of everything – roads, trees, bollards, buildings, people – but undergrowth, earwigs, and the Evening Standard. You don’t need to imagine; you’re already there. You’re wandering through the second city, its towers built from fraying newsprint. London is not a place to live; it’s a vast, decaying, mobile archive; a hole ceaselessly filling itself with the Evening Standard.

Reading the Standard always gives me a feeling of slow, creeping fury, boiling just below my skin, the sense that I might suddenly break out in gleaming pustules of bile right there on the Tube, that some parasite worming through the paper could claw its way into my eyeballs on its tiny hooks, fester, and breed: then vomiting, suppuration, horror, the screaming commuters banging their fists bloody on the windows as they try to escape, the train howling to a stop in the middle of the tunnel, the armed police in hazmat suits quarantining the area, lights sweeping through the shivering and the dying, the paper in my hands suddenly gone. Not on the first reading, of course: the Standard is awful in the same way London itself is awful, its vastness slowly bending in on itself until it becomes a cage, the steady tick of days and weeks and years, thudding past like the slats on a train journey: here you are, still in London, older, sadder, lonelier, and here’s another edition of the Evening Standard to carry you home to ready meals, Netflix, and sleep.

It’s monstrous in a way entirely different from the Daily Mail, for instance, which announces its monstrousness right there in screaming letters on the front page, or the neo-Nazi Spectator, making the reasonable case for racism in hectoring and patient tones. As long as there are Tories there will be Tory papers; complaining that the right-wing exists is entirely valid but not particularly useful. I’m not even talking about its most publicised outrages, although there are many. During the London mayoral election, for instance, there was its despicably Islamophobic campaign against Sadiq Khan, screaming in panic about his phantasmal terrorist connections, until he won the largest electoral mandate of any politician in British history, and the paper suddenly rolled over with drooping ears, fawning over wonderful lovely Sadiq and his brilliant plans for brilliant London. (Khan, of course, is the liberal ideal of the assimilated Muslim, a chummy tieless true-blue Labour Brit; if it can happen to him, then is anyone safe?) There’s its recent appointment of George Osborne, a Vaselined marionette whose only previous journalistic experience was as a freelancer for the Peterborough diary column at the Daily Telegraph, as editor. There was that gurning fluff piece on the alt-right, full of grateful remarks on how dapper they all look with their sweater-vests and their pale and perfectly cubical heads, complete with instructions on how to get the ‘fashie’ haircut for yourself. There’s its tireless advocacy for that fucking Garden Bridge. All this is awful and unexceptional. This is the media we’re talking about; why would you expect anything other than racism, idiocy, and a nice tongue-bath for established power?

What makes the Standard so uniquely infuriating is this. Several years ago, a group of skaters were campaigning to halt the vandalism-by-redevelopment of the magnificent South Bank Centre, and along the way prevent the bulldozing of its undercroft, a much-loved graffiti and skateboarding space. It should have been hard to oppose them on this: the skate park gave joy to thousands, destroying it would have given money to a few. Not for the Evening Standard. In a short note appended to an editorial column, the paper congratulated the skaters of the successes of their campaign. ‘In this stand-off between culture and counter-culture, the skaters have pulled off some deft moves,’ it wrote. And then, without warning: ‘But it is now time for them to see reason.’ What reason? What are they talking about? What could this possibly mean? The world is full of people making the case for what is stupid and wrong, but the Evening Standard never even makes its case. Here is something stupid and wrong, please agree with it at once. After all, this is what’s reasonable. That sentence contains in its ten short words everything that’s broken in life. The thoughtless appeal to a common sense that never existed. The endless construction of the reasonable conservative subject, spat out in their millions, naked and glistening onto the tarmac as the traffic arrives, reading the Evening Standard. If the world were a rational place, if people really were ever capable of seeing reason, that would have been it: eight hundred and fifty thousand trudging commuters would have thrown up their hands – god, fuck this – and immediately assembled to burn down the offices of the Evening Standard and start building a society in which nothing so blindly meaningless could ever happen again.

They may as well put it up on the masthead, in little manicured letters by the picture of Eros: Sed nunc tempus est ratio videre. To see reason; to do what is already being done, and not complain about it. In most newspapers the reactionary spite is calculated, mendacious, and vicious; in the Standard what dominates is a total witlessness. It’s all seemingly by accident, none of these people understand what they’re saying, they don’t know why they think the way they do, they don’t even really think. Take a journey with me, walk through the pages of the Evening Standard, see its gardens of fury. Half of the paper appears to have been written in crayon. In an article on infrastructure maintenance, the opening paragraph – this is entirely real – informs us that ‘Tower Bridge has to close for three months because the road surface is falling apart, the man in charge of it said today.’ Innumeracy is everywhere in its massive property section, which cheerfully exhorts you to move into a £3.6m new-build penthouse with a balcony swimming pool and 24-hour concierge. The lifestyle pages read like promotional copy – ooh, we all love a nice cupcake, don’t we. The opinion pages regularly host the observations of an extremely long-winded four-year-old child. One column sagely informs the reader that while it feels bad to get stuck in the rain, it also helps the crops grow, and that’s good. Another, from September of last year, took a full page to let us know that it’s autumn now. Various drabs of opinion impress on you the fact that London is good and great and the most wonderful city in the world; in others the writers simply summarise a book they just read, or say that there’s been a lot of good stuff of the telly lately.

When they turn to politics it’s similarly stupid. In November, the Standard told its London-based readership that the only person they could in good conscience vote for was Hillary Clinton. After the Copeland by-election, we were told that ‘the distinguished Cambridge historian Robert Tombs has called the European Union a system of “managed discontents.” Something similar could be said about Corbyn’s Labour, except that its discontents are scarcely managed at all’ – a fantastically terrible piece of writing, introducing a comparison only to immediately proclaim its uselessness in the very next sentence. With dispiriting frequency, Evening Standard writers like to dream up dialogues within Cabinet meetings – politics, as imagined by an idiot! – always giving the strange sense that you’re watching the world’s least popular child playing with her action figures. Finally, the star columnists. Here comes Matthew D’Ancona, plodding about like a lost child in orthopaedic shoes, with his glum little question mark of a face significantly too small for his head, and his mildly interesting name in lieu of anything interesting to say. Here comes Simon Jenkins, whingeing that he went for a walk in the park and some children who were probably immigrants splashed mud on his new linen trousers. Here’s the Tory line, repeated not out of any ideological impetus but as pure common sense: here it is, it’s time to see reason. Here they all are, shuffling, brainless, petulant, and wrong, the Kharons of London’s new modern hell, come to ferry you home.

You’re worried that having George Osborne as editor might compromise the paper’s editorial independence. What editorial independence? The Standard is a jellyfish, a parasitic worm, a creature with a hole at each end and nothing inbetween: it thinks nothing, it feels nothing, it floats through the infinite dark and waits for a tide to carry it along. Hence the fury. If someone believes something and you don’t concur, you can disagree with them. If someone has bad opinions, you can correct them. But there are no real opinions in the Standard, just the trace of drifting plankton, just idiocy and repetition. Sadiq Khan was a terrorist, now he’s the cuddliest mayor in the whole wide world; the tides changed, and this twitching thing drifted in another direction. It was autumn once, but now it’s spring. The Evening Standard is London’s paper; it’s the paper that London deserves: a proud and ancient city that’s now nothing more than a brief staging-post for international capital, whose lifeblood and materiality is nothing more than the wordless, unconscious, insatiable self-expansion of capital. Always parasitic, powerless without its structures of domination, achieving nothing by itself except the immiseration of others; always solipsistic, always feared, always terrified. If capitalism could speak, it would speak with a child’s voice. If capitalism could speak, it would speak like the Evening Standard.

I think I’m still in shock. When the sun rose this morning it was blistered with the face of Donald Trump, bronze and smirking hideous, and all I can think about is Hillary Clinton. It’s what I know. Throughout the entire election, one slow-motion clip of a clown car ramming into a crowd of pedestrians, I’d assumed that the danger of Trump and the danger of Clinton were of two different orders. Trump was dangerous because of what he said and what he represented, the waves of fascism and violence that rippled out from the dead plopping weight of his speeches. Clinton was dangerous because of what she would actually do, because Clinton was going to win the election. I was a sucker, the kind who gets duped precisely by believing himself to be too smart for any kind of con. I thought I saw through it all, the whole stupid charade, a coronation disguised as a battlefield. I was wrong. This was exactly what Hillary Clinton wanted people like me to think; she wanted to be an inevitability. And this is why Trump won: the presidency was Clinton’s to lose, from the moment she announced her candidacy, and she lost it. She was the only person who could. People don’t like taking part in someone else’s inevitability.

Why did Hillary Clinton run for President? The most gruesome spectacle of Election Day was her short speech outside the polling station in Chappaqua, New York. ‘It’s the most humbling feeling,’ she said, of voting for herself to control an enormous nuclear arsenal. All electoral politics are predicated on this kind of bullshit, the debates, the campaign ads, the phony acceptance speeches, the highminded types trying to focus on the ‘issues,’ as if there’s any issue at play beyond a pair of hungry-eyed megalomaniacs deciding that they want power. Someone like Trump might have been stupid enough to convince himself that he at least had some kind of grand vision for the country, or the will and dedication to really get things done, but Clinton had no such illusions. She’s been in government for a long time; she knew that the powers of the presidency can be competently exercised by any grey and dismal middle manager, she knew that she had nothing particularly unique to offer. She was running not because there was anything in particular she wanted to get done – look how slippery her positions have been on just about every issue – but because she wanted it, the big chair and the big desk and the first female President; she decided that it was her turn, that it was hers by right. She knew that she was electoral poison, that vast swathes of the country hated her and for good reason, that she was compromised by a miserable record spotted with sleaze and criminality, that she alienated the left, inflamed the right, and appealed mostly to a small coterie of sexually repressed and pathologically centrist think-tank nerds, that her entire constituency was made of limp cardboard and backlogged semen, that her candidacy raised the serious possibility of a Republican victory when anyone else would have beaten that divided and frothing party into insignificance with one hand tied behind their back – but she ran anyway.

And then she lost. Despite it all, the vast monumental horror of a Trump presidency, it’s hard not to feel a little twinge of satisfaction as Hillary Clinton is denied the only thing she ever wanted and which she never deserved. Trump has promised to send her to prison. Good. It’d be for all the wrong reasons, but her crimes are many, and losing a general election to an overgrown baby should absolutely carry a long minimum sentence. Let her rot.

Clinton’s media foot-rubbers are presenting this result as a victory for prejudice: Trump won on a platform of racism, sexism, ableism, misogynoir, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia; the American people are hateful beyond reason, and they elected a knight of the kyriarchy to turn their roiling incoherent psychopathologies into government policy. Of course these people are right; it would be incredibly stupid to discount the role of outright bigotry, especially in a country that has fuelled itself on bigotry for three hundred years. But it’s not enough; if the only problem was too many bigots the whole elections collapses into a question of tribes and demographics, and you don’t have to think about why Clinton lost. Trump won among voters who ticked the box for Obama in 2008 and 2012, he won decisively among white women, he picked up a far bigger share of ethnic minority voters than anyone would have reasonably expected, he won because the standard formula of American liberalism – eternal war abroad coupled with rationally administered dispossession at home and an ethics centred on where people should be allowed to piss and shit – is a toxic and unlovable ideology, and his candidacy turned it from an invisible consensus to one option among others.

Hillary Clinton had nothing to offer people; all she could give them was fear and herself. Her campaign was the most cack-handed and disastrous in recent decades, managed by a gang of simpering imbeciles pretending to be Machiavellian strategists; it was all on the flimsy depthless level of TV. Now watch her whip, now watch her nae nae. Yaas kween, slay kween, slay. Clinton was to be carried through her path to the White House on the shoulders of irritating media celebrities; Lena Dunham’s Instagram feed, Beyoncé’s stage shows, Robert De Niro’s menacing monologues. Clinton strategists actively and deliberately abetted Trump at every stage of his rise through the Republican primaries, dignifying his candidacy with every statement of disapproval, because they thought that he was the enemy she had the best chance of beating. Clinton spent the final weeks of her campaign against a parody toddler obsessing over weird conspiracy theories, painting her opponent as a secret Russian agent. Clinton decided, as a vast country fumed bitterly for something different, anything, that she would actively court the approval of a few hundred policy wonks. Clinton all but outrightly told vast swathes of the American working classes that they were irrelevant, that she didn’t need them and they would be left behind by history, and then expected them to vote for her anyway. Clinton was playing at politics; it was a big and important game, but it could be fun too; it was entertainment, it was a play of personalities. Her campaign tried to reproduce the broad 500-channel swathe of TV: an intrigue-riddled prestige drama and a music video and the 24-hour news; they forgot that trashy reality shows always get the highest ratings.

Donald Trump is a fascist. We shouldn’t be afraid of the word: it’s simple and accurate, and his fascism is hardly unique; it’s just a suppurating outgrowth of the fascism that was already there. Still, this time it’s different. The fascisms of Europe in the 1920s and 30s, or east Asia in the 50s and 60s, or Latin America in the 70s and 80s were all the response of a capitalist order to the terrifying potency of an organised working class. Fascism is what capitalism does when it’s under threat, something always latent but extending in claws when it’s time to fight; it imitates mass movements while never really having the support of the masses. (In Germany, for instance, support for the Nazis was highest among the industrial haute bourgeoisie, and declined through every social stratum; look at Trump’s share of the voter per income band and see the same pattern. The workers didn’t vote for Trump, they just didn’t vote for Clinton either.) But today the organised working class is nowhere to be found. There’s no coherent left-wing movement actively endangering capitalism; the crisis facing the liberal-capitalist order is entirely internal. It’s grinding against its own contradictions, circling the globe to turn back against itself, smashing through its biological and ecological limits and finding nothing on the other side. This is the death spasm, a truly nihilist fascism, the fascism of a global system prickling for enemies to destroy but charging only against itself. There’s no silence in the final and total victory, just an endless war with only one side. It’s not entirely the case, as the slogan puts it, that the only thing capable of defeating the radical right is a radical left. The radical right will defeat itself, sooner or later, even if it’s at the cost of a few tens of millions of lives. We need a radical left so there can be any kind of fight at all.