There is no end to history, only when it begins again. It begins again when those processes that were once shielded by plausible deniability are unshielded; when those things that are held sacred in verbiage, in tradition, in promise are publicly tarnished, exposing what had been happening all along, and we see that, whether they are made visible or not, those mechanisms which account for history’s relapse are unshakeable, interwoven into the fabric of truth which we use to tether ourselves to the world.

Or there is no end to history, only the shedding of one of its layers. The so-called knowledge granted to us through the projections of the eye already exists in the subterranean layers of our consciousness, reflected back at us in the world, clouded by earthly symbols. We do away with a symbol (i.e. the Department of Defense is renamed the Department of War), and what is worrisome to us is not that it is changing, but its sudden obviousness; what is now visible has always been lying there a layer beneath what we are content to acknowledge, the threat of its exposure lingering in the near future. We will have reached the elusive center of history’s sphere once our symbols, our language, our simulations, begin to resemble what it imitates. Until then, there are layers and layers between our language and the concepts it means to name, our vision and the object it means to see. There are layers and layers for us to peel off before we can discover what we already know.¹

The imposition of any structure requires a Nietzschean Will to Power: in an attempt to organize and explain the world, we dominate it by imposing societal rules and regulations that are in innate opposition to our animalistic urges. A world that is understood can be controlled, and we prefer to be under the control of forces we can understand, as opposed to the forces of our innermost instincts which are completely incomprehensible to us.

Society, Paglia claims in Sex and Violence, or Nature and Art, is the thin barrier which stands between us and sadomasochistic Hell, rejecting Rousseau’s naïve claim at the beginning of The Social Contract that “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” Her argument is traced back to Freud: humans must always be controlled by the imposition of Civilization because if they could truly act on their urges it would be too dangerous, but due to the fact that they will always have to be part of civilization, they will always be Discontent.²

The contemporary issue is less about the fact of our discontentment and more about the infrastructure of our civilization itself: that it was constructed by humans means it is saturated with the very drives it seeks to contain. Any system we build to control chaos will inevitably absorb and reproduce that chaos, like our children who will absorb and reproduce the consequences of their early childhood development. Any system we build to suppress our dark instincts will become vehicles for those same instincts. Walter Benjamin wrote “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”³ If a system of governance is erected as a means to implement the Good, then the evil will emerge in individuals, and the system will inevitably erode. Any structured imposition on humanity and their whims will eventually crumble, not only because of the dark underbelly that expands as the imposition expands, but also because the architects of that structure are human. 

In many ways, the question of structure and the imposition of order is already answered in the biblical construction of the Tower of Babel, which demonstrates the inherent instability of any human attempt to create unified societal structure under a self-determined form, or what Dostoevsky calls “the question of the form taken by atheism today, the question of the tower of Babel built without God, not to mount to Heaven from earth but to set up Heaven on earth.”⁴ The without God signifies an absence of positive, universal virtue instead substituted with a corrupted imitation of heavenly order—the structure does not emerge from a transcendent origin but out of irrational and instinctual wills to power, each asserting itself under the guise of universality. Attempts to establish Heaven on earth as men, to render a perfect structure, will collapse by its own contradictions, at the hands of its own architects.

Our process of creation is referential to ourselves, and we can only create in our own image. Language operates as a mechanism of concealment, democracy descends into consumerist simulation of consent—everything descends into the earth after enough time, the cycle spirals downward; an abandoned building is reabsorbed by vines and moss until it appears again to be nothing more than a patch of grass and woods.

  “Reflection shows us that our image of happiness is thoroughly colored by the time to which the course of our own existence has assigned us. The kind of happiness that could arouse envy in us exists only in the air we have breathed, among people we could have talked to, women who could have given themselves to us…our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption. The same applies to our view of the past, which is the concern of history.”
               —Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, p. 197

The word Democracy is a vestige from a world that no longer exists, or never existed, fossilized into our vernacular several layers past in the historical sphere. It may have died when it was dreamt, or it died with the birth of Plato, or it died when it was re-conceived in verbiage, placated in the Constitution, or in its application to the polis, or it died in 1883 when the Pendleton Act overturned the spoils system and our civil bureaucracy was formed.⁵ Regardless of those particulars, it was vanquished long before we’d like to admit. Now emptied in meaning, democracy as a word carries the hefty weight of its emotional past, operating mainly as an invocation of something. The lineage of democracy in America balances fickly on the aura surrounding its conception: the dream of a young nation, a revolution led by scrappy men—its invocation of nostalgia for a past none of us can remember carries for the populace the same invincible power of a Saint, like the Holy Spirit of America who, if threatened, puts under threat the dream of the whole nation. 

“Empathy with the victor invariably benefits the rulers.”
           — Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History

In the beginning was a new country enduring the immediate effects of a victorious revolution. Democracy was redemptive as a direct response to the suppressive monarchy, but not reactive—it was technically conceived in an exercise of positive virtue: the application of a new system of governance as opposed to a mere toppling of the previous one. This was a body politic that existed outside of the self and established a polis, founded in the protection of “inalienable rights of man” as a unionizing force as opposed to union based in personal belief or passions or joint oppression—virtues which are all temporal and therefore the basis for an unstable, more sensual society. The founders aimed to create a government responsive to popular will, dispersing power among various branches and offices, whose interests were meant to be reflective of the interests of the people.

That is, according to historical record. The late 18th century, colored into our collective memory with oil paint, shows us images of stately men, dignified debates, powder wigs—alien enough to be folkloric and malleable to the whim of the storyteller, but recounted and referred to often enough that we’ve become attached to them as symbols of canonical truth, regardless of how they are invoked, and by who. The mythical nature of the conception of American Democracy is what gives it its contemporary significance, not its function—myths and fantasy are drastically more effective mechanisms of control than Reality. 

It is no secret that nostalgia can be effectively harnessed by those in power to evoke seductive psychically repressed false memories of Better Days and The Good Life; to bend crowds toward the whim of an ideological party whose interests are the exact opposite of the Voter, who might just as easily be called the consumer, just as party might be called corporation. The most effective strategic use of nostalgia is not in promising a return to the past as it was, but to an invented one: dredge up from the unconscious hazy memories of lost paradise, reinvent a political era in a flattering light of the party in power, dangle before the voter the Garden of Eden, hollow out a void in their hearts where the posthumously canonized concept of Democracy once sat, then tell them who took it away. We then find, all of the sudden, alongside the Conservative party—whose function has always been to turn us toward the past, and to conserve it—are the “Progressives,” who once urged us to look forward into possibility, suggesting now that we restore. And just as it is unclear what era the “Again” in MAGA refers to, it is equally unclear what version of Democracy is to be “restored.”

Nostalgia will remain an effective governing mechanism so long as the myth of the Past evokes something within the audience of consumers who become nostalgic not for “Democracy” but for an era of democratic appearances, or in whatever folklore of the golden age of democracy they have chosen to believe. Democracy becomes the “Again” in the liberal MAGA—a declaration, an elusive dangling dream of a wish of what could have been.

“The true world — attainable for the sage, the pious, the 
virtuous man; he lives in it, he is it.

(The oldest form of the idea, relatively sensible, simple, and 
persuasive. A circumlocution for the sentence, ‘I, Plato, am the 
truth.’)”

                   — Friedrich Nietzsche, “HOW THE "TRUE WORLD" FINALLY BECAME A FABLE. The History of an Error”

Consensus is such a fickle thing that reminds me of the way the tide’s retreat on a beach from the vantage of the half-drenched sand appears to be somehow pulling you into the ocean—the only way to reach consensus, as in understanding, between individuals is in fact to honestly examine oneself; to peer deeply enough inside oneself that one discovers The unnameable Thing that is in all of us. If we were to do this, perhaps an Emersonian kind of transcendental democracy might emerge. Unfortunately this notion has been not only skillfully dismissed but also clichéd. Interiority has somehow been entirely discouraged in the land of rugged individuals and True Freedom is defined by the Freedom to Choose between exterior virtues, manifest either as products or ideology,⁶ neither of which have anything to do with The Thing I mentioned earlier. A lack of emphasis on the universal interior, as with the without God in the construction of Babel, is the cause of collapse and dissolution. This is what I mean to say about the imposition of structure and system and laws—they are temporal because their virtues are imposed exteriorly, eroding into time as their definitions are distorted by the will of those in power. 

The authors of history (and I cannot simply say History, because that would imply truth, and I do not know if it is truth, because I did not witness it) have, since the death of Socrates, insisted that at the center of any governing structure there must be some form of consensus. But what followed was the redefinition of truth itself as consensus. “Truth” becomes what is agreed upon, what is ratified—“truth” becomes Plato, something attainable only for “the sage, the pious.” As Nietzsche shows in the first stage of How the True World Finally Became a Fable, this move creates a separate, exterior “true world,” and we outsource our virtue to it.

Of course this has its practical advantages. Hannah Arendt argued that for a revolution to be technically successful it must be founded in exterior, productive virtue, like the formation of a polis, and devoid of transient goals of more passionate revolutions, like the French overthrowing the bourgeoisie. But we can see that, regardless of whether our governing structure grounds itself in the exterior virtues of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or in the passionate pursuit of overthrowing the ruling class, consensus is governed by whoever is in power. What once appeared to be a solid, magnetic center from which our society extended dissolves over time, leaving behind only a word: “democracy,” whose definition is now unclear.

“History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogenous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now (Jetztzeit)”
        —Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, p.205

There is no stable fingerhold in the ever-protruding mountain of History because it draws conclusions from retelling. In a linear conception of time, the events of the past materialize into objects in the future by way of representational mechanisms: words function as objects in the bourgeois timeline, which is to say in a timeline perceived “progressively,” which imagines time if not linearly then as a building outward upon foundations laid by the victors of the past. To the victors belong the spoils of historical objects, leashed above us as we sink deeper into time. The objects are anchors convoluting our inward advancement as they tie us to the past which gives them their value. The word “democracy,” while its definition grows increasingly unclear with time’s erosion inward (as opposed to “progression” forward or outward), is harnessed by the descendents of the victors. And the regular democratic citizen has successfully become dependent on its theoretical existence.

Any object of our desire that we have grown to depend on is not brought about naturally—that is, besides the most primal of our desires—and is instead imposed upon us by external forces through the provocation of those instinctual desires. This is a central concept in The Century of the Self, in which Adam Curtis discusses the “manufacturing of desire.” 

After World War I in the 1920s, corporations worried that factory efficiency would lead to overproduction and people would no longer need to buy products because all of their needs would already be met. The solution, as proposed by Freud’s nephew Ed Bernays, was to shift from a needs-based to a desires-based economy: products would be linked to people’s unconscious desires through marketing tactics informed by psychoanalysis, leading them to connect their sense of survival and even identity to products and consumption.

A central tenet of psychoanalytic theory is that desire is predicated on lack. Modern marketing works on us because it persuades us to believe that without the manufactured solutions corporations propose, we’re under threat of suffering from a problem we may have been previously unaware of. And the problems, of course, are first installed in our minds by those same corporations.

A central tenet of our unconscious, more animalistic instincts is the desire for safety and protection. Corporations, using the same logic that has persisted since Bernays’ invention of modern marketing, must then make consumers feel under threat, with the future of their safety hingeing on their purchase of the product. And so products are best sold when the populace is in a state of paranoia. This corporate logic structures our political economy: the prevailing threat is fascism, and the proposed solution is democracy.

The function of fascism, or the specter of fascism, which we imagine looming at the cracks of our democracy, is to keep us paranoid, to scare the populace enough that the people turn to the established system for refuge and relegitimize it—in other words, in trying to escape a suppressive totalitarian regime, we run straight into its arms.⁷ The paranoid state of our civilization, centered around the idea that democracy is the thin barrier between peace and full-fledged fascism, functions to make us believe that there is something we must be constantly protected from, so we are therefore more willing to surrender to the Freudian mother of the national security state: overbearing, but insisting it has our best interests at heart. It warns us of all the dangers that await if we step outside, and so we learn to feel safest pressed against its breast. It cultivates the fears it claims to protect us from, a kind of Munchausen-by-proxy.


The declaration that we must “save our democracy” now arrives alongside President Trump openly demonstrating his own bastardization of it, much like Andrew Jackson did with the spoils system. What we are seeing is not something entirely new, but rather the undercurrents of history made suddenly visible. Democrats, however, will treat Trump as though he were the first “undemocratic” president, and suggest that it is through yet another so-called democratic election that the system can be “fixed.” But the real reason we need our democracy is so that voters have an object from the past to hold on to and defend, a bourgeois object that functions as an alibi for the descent into fascism, for corporations to wield their power against the populace and extort them daily, which they accept masochistically.


The point is that rather than “the only means of combating fascism” that many make it out to be, democracy can more accurately be called fascism’s origin; fascism’s prerequisite. The relationship between fascism and democracy is reciprocal, codependent, complementary—one does not exist without the other. The posthumous sainthood status of democracy, its mythical nature, the dream it evokes, is what keeps us emotionally attached to the national security state and overconsumption—we must defend democracy against the fascism that threatens to take away everything, even the venerable Right to Vote.

“For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.”
               — Audre Lorde⁸

The function of democracy as it is perpetually entwined with bureaucracy is to prevent radical change by imposing regulations and speed bumps to ensure that the cycle continues which benefits the ruling class. No election will liberate the voter. That we should use the word “democratic” to be synonymous with good, that we want to “save” it at all is another victory of corporate marketing. Without cries to “save our democracy” from the threat of fascism, we might realize we are in fascism already.⁹

In the same way that identifying yourself with a product carries a kind of therapeutic value, so too does identifying yourself with a political party. It is through corporate-funded democratic elections that we are urged to express ourselves through the nostalgically marketed civic power of the “vote.” The importance of the vote is one of the most effectively merchandised elements of the fascist alibi embedded in “Save Our Democracy” campaigning. We are shown news stories of dedicated citizens sweating in the heat on election Tuesday, waiting in unjustly long lines: a CBS interview, perhaps with a teacher—a public school teacher who has just recovered from breast cancer, who has seven children, two of whom have Down syndrome, whose husband died three years ago—who waits in those same lines every year without fail, telling us with earnest sincerity that our vote is all we have, that it is both our duty and our right as democratic citizens. We are taught to revere the 15th and 19th Amendments as triumphs of democracy—that to abstain from voting would be to betray those who fought for the right to participate in the system that once excluded them.


People, typically those running for office, say that those in power want to take away your right to vote by making it more difficult through voter suppression or gerrymandering—another indication of the fragile shield democracy provides against fascism. And it is true that barriers to voting exist as a mechanism of suppression and discrimination. But the ambiguous monster behind the “they” is that same projection of fascism onto an external enemy, when it is really at work within democracy itself. Gerrymandering, in this sense, functions as a kind of perverse reinforcement that the vote must be immensely powerful if those in power are so intent on taking it away. The extreme emotional and violent nature of the history of the right to vote is what gives it such weight. Voters are aware that individual voting power is largely futile against the machinery of the democratic system, yet the symbol of the vote remains deeply important.


Struggles for the right to vote, as positive in virtue as they are, fold back into the cycle of history. The disruption is momentary while fascist means of oppression rework themselves. As Walter Benjamin said, “the worker is always in a state of emergency.”¹⁰ What appears to be progress is absorbed and returned to the same persisting order; everything always falls backward and is absorbed into the amalgamation of what it has always been.

“One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge—unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable.” 
               — Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, p. 207

So the agreed-upon structure we instituted to barricade civilization against our most evil instincts becomes their vehicle, while simultaneously publicly held aloft as our final safeguard against institutional evil. This is nowhere more visible than in ICE detention centers. ICE agents are not aberrations within the system, but function as its limbs: individuals whose violence is not only permitted but formalized and protected by the structure designed to regulate them.

In a congressionally mandated report on the largest immigration detention facility in the US—Camp East Montana in El Paso—inspectors from the Office of Detention Oversight reported 49 violations, which ICE posted on their website. Most of the violations fell under the category of “use of force and restraints,” and also notably included “medical care,” “security,” and violations in the grievance system itself. 2025 saw the highest number of deaths in ICE facilities, and 2026 is on track to surpass it. In January, a detainee at Camp East Montana named Geraldo Lunas Campos died in ICE custody—the DHS reported that he had attempted suicide, but witnesses say Lunas Campos was tackled and restrained by multiple guards and that he shouted “I can’t breathe” in Spanish before his death. The El Paso coroner ruled his death a homicide: asphyxia due to neck and torso compression. The DHS says he just died on his own during the altercation. Everything is public; it does not matter what they claim, which courts they report to, what videos people see, what witnesses claim, what flags people wave outside their facilities, what violations the congressionally mandated inspections report, because they are invincible when they are empowered by, and employed by, the infrastructure of democracy.  

The privatization of ICE detention centers was motivated by profit for Geo Group and CoreCivic, two major corporate donors to Trump’s inauguration fund. ICE detention centers are their biggest source of revenue—the deal between the government and these corporations is like a closed circuit of infinite profit and power: the corporations’ profit incentive is in increased number of detainees, they invest money in Trump’s election campaign, Trump campaigns on more imprisonments and deportations, gets reelected for fulfilling his promise, the profit increases for the corporations. The participatory government publicly dissolves into insular profit-machines, wherein the currency is extracted from prisoners in destitute conditions. 

My friend’s wealthy father shouts “this is what democracy looks like” at the No-Kings Protest. Rachel Maddow scoffs on screen. The New York Times blasts headlines: “BREAKING NEWS: A Judge Tossed Blake Lively’s Case Against Justin Baldoni,” “BREAKING NEWS: Deaths in ICE Custody Are Growing. ‘They Let Him Rot in There.’” 

If the discourses between corporations and politicians which exploit individuals for profit and power are visible now to the naked eye, it is not regression that will “fix” it, especially not a return to a mythical past. And it is this theater of returning, a charade performed by both parties, that rests at the center of our elections. And in this theater, the same people always win, and the same people always lose—we remain actors in the same stories so long as our desires are regulated by an elusive past, by the cellular memory of mother’s womb. Guided by this yearning for comfort, we find solace in the empty word, the hollow shell of democracy, or else we clutch her carcass, searching for someone to blame, shouting at one of the thousand men with bloody knives, “you specifically killed her!”

“Social Democracy thought fit to assign to the working class the role of the redeemer of future generations, in this way cutting the sinews of its greatest strength. This training made the working class forget both its hatred and its spirit of sacrifice, for both are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren.”
               — Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, p.204

I am writing these final paragraphs from my post behind a desk in a bookstore, and a few minutes ago someone I kind of know came in to suggest something to me, and he asked me what I was writing, and I told him, and then he called me all kinds of things (a Marxist, an anarchist, a democratic socialist, a revolutionary communist, a capitalist) and then left. So wrong, I thought, before I considered for a singular second that it might be sort of silly to refuse to adopt a political belief system. “Well what you’re talking about criticizing is liberal democracy,” he had said. “As opposed to what?” I said. “The dictatorship of the proletariat,” he said. “Every revolution has failed and will continually fail, until it succeeds.” Then I remembered about why so many people believe in a promised land in heaven, which fits linearly into their perception of the progression of their earthly life.

I do in fact believe in something, though I am unsure of what it looks like, because it is not something the brain which conceives time linearly can easily comprehend, which is why it can be the only thing capable of rupturing deeply normalized systems of oppression. That is, my belief reflects Walter Benjamin’s belief that revolution must occur as a total disruption of linear time and progress—that the revolution simply cannot occur as one of history’s stages. The dictatorship of the proletariat is transitional in the traditional Marxist sense of “progress,” from one stage to the next, where each stage grows out of the failure of the previous one: feudalism turns to capitalism turns to transitional socialism turns to, finally, communism; a classless society. We must release the idea that we can take anything from the past with us; history guarantees us nothing. We should be wary of any belief system that says “this is necessary for progress”—this is why fascism is normalized. 

We may not be able to logically conceive what this revolution and its conditions look like. Benjamin imagines the appearance of a Messianic power which ruptures time and the normal progression of history and charges the present moment with meaning—that is the jetztzeit, the “now-time,” which happens in contrast to the “empty” time that progresses linearly. The rupture is sudden, and occurs during a fragile period when the normal progression of history appears to be weakening, when the veil is thin and layers are shed. This period is what we are warned of, what we are told will open the floodgates to fascism if we aren’t quick to mend it, and that democracy is its only levee. But these are not holes that we need to mend, or holes that can be mended using the logic of the past. Rather they are openings where revolution can occur.

I also believe this: beneath the foundations of the skyscrapers and castles raised ever higher away from the earth, away from the center, away from the lower regions, the lower classes whose single-story homes slip and collapse in earthquakes and landslides, beneath the homes of those who deal directly with the soil—the miners descending into the ground, farmers planting crops in the sinking Mississippi Delta—beneath the foundations of those towers inhabited by people whose hands never deal directly with the earth, there are the layers I was talking about before, those layers of history which shed. And it is from the damp earth that those tower dwellers extract their materials to build their wobbling towers ever higher until at last they can no longer see the ground, and they build so high that, from up there, they begin to imitate the world below with intangible things like “data.” And inward history erodes alongside this so-called data revolution, which strips the earth and stacks its fragments precariously atop towers like Jenga, like Pisa, like Babel. Soon, they hope, they will have hollowed out the very foundations entirely, so that their towers may hover in the sky. And when those towers collapse, as the layers of history give way, it will be those on the ground who survive, because they already know what those above them will only begin to rediscover, what those above them are too afraid to admit.
____
¹ Some might argue that perhaps by shedding layers we are getting closer to something good. This is my understanding of the “accelerationist” perspective. “Let the world fold in on itself,” it sounds like they’re saying, “Then we can rebuild it from scratch, this time better. And once we’ve exploded our society we can eliminate the notion that we’d ever be inclined to recreate a new society reflective of its previous image.” That is, we must propel ourselves directly into the center and rebuild outward. The obvious issue with this theory is that it fails to acknowledge the conditions of this descent—what we challenge to name and perhaps through their naming in some way chip-away-at. In the instance of accelerationism, these conditions are the necessary death and destruction involved in our implosion. Or it does acknowledge the conditions but fails to acknowledge their practical severity, therefore representing what might be the biggest pitfall of philosophical analysis: that to view the world as an entity capable of being analyzed, one must separate oneself from the world. The secondary issue with this theory is its implication that what we find at the center will be good, something we want to uncover and not leave buried in the unconscious like an Oedipal nightmare.


² Freud, Civilization and its Discontents.


³ Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, p. 200.


⁴ Dostoevsky,  The Brothers Karamazov, p. 20.


⁵ WHY THE SPOILS SYSTEM IS TECHNICALLY MORE “DEMOCRATIC” THAN OUR CIVIL BUREAUCRACY: Derived from the phrase “to the victors belong the spoils,” the spoils system, as abused by Andrew Jackson, gave the democratically elected President (the victor) the capacity to carry out the duties he was elected to fulfill by stacking his offices (the spoils) with the people he is politically aligned with, without the delaying infrastructure of “objective” bureaucrats: extra-governmental specialists who prevent the democratically elected president from doing what he was elected to do. When the Pendleton Act of 1883 was ratified and the spoils system was subsequently abolished to create the civil service, i.e. a series of offices filled with apolitical “specialists,” we shifted from a democracy to an aristocracy: “rule of the best” (the specialists) as opposed to “rule of the people.” Whether we want a rule of the people or a rule of the best is one question, but we must be honest with ourselves about this: if those bourgeois anti-Trump liberals who took to the “streets” for the No Kings Protest truly revered the Democracy in whose defense they cry out then they cannot at the same time claim that those Trump voters at whom they sneer for undoing our sacred Democracy do not know what’s good for them in the casting of their vote, that there should be regulations put in place by people who know better, in other words, who are more educated, have more access, are more rational. And indeed this also begs semantic questions about what “best” means, by what standard one can measure “best.” Nietzsche compellingly asserts in Genealogy of Morals that this is a matter of “nobility:” that, in antiquity, the arbiters of the standard “good” were the noble men, and bad, “schlect,” the peasant class are semantically amoral, unclean. The passage of the Pendleton Act and its creation of a new expert-class in our bureaucracy and the subsequent increasing class divide, which is also demonstrated in the massively classist nature of the Constitutional electoral process, supports this Nietzschean conception of Good, of best—what they really want to restore is our aristocracy.


⁶ An example of freedom being renamed choice, and political ideology meaning identity: abortion and women’s health. The failure of women’s healthcare, its slow advancement and its “lack of attention” is not due to the shortcomings of science or Catholicism of republican lawmakers, dismissed by the left as “fanatics.” The real fanatics are not our lawmakers, whose “catholicism” means nothing when they get their mistresses pregnant—the fanatics are the voters who have been pigeonholed into fanaticism in order to keep abortion contested on the ballot. Now that “freedom” no longer means Freedom but “choice” between parties and ballot items, keeping the prevailing “choice” debate alive keeps fanatics (both the god-fearing and the abortion-pilled) ideologically attached, sinking deeper into caricatures of their party. No lawmaker is actually concerned about what God has to say about all this, only how to keep calling “freedom” into question. Voters need to be afraid they will lose their choice.


⁷Paglia in Sex and Violence or Nature and Art, p.11: “Oedipus, trying to escape his mother, runs straight into her arms.”



⁸From The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House, speech delivered at an academic feminist conference commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, The Anarchist Library.


9 I see that my own logic regarding the vacuous definitions of these overused words unravels when I use the word fascist strictly as a pejorative, as an entity separate from the democracy which enables it. I’ve even done it just now with the word “it.” It just happened that I’m using the word fascist in its generally agreed upon definition, whereas my use of the word democracy varies contextually.


¹⁰Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, p.211.

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