Trump reads alliances as costs to cut, missing that they are the distributed, Global infrastructure and constitutive precondition through which American power exists and persists at all.
Tag: symbolic power
Categories
Bad Bunny: Culture trumps Politics
America is presently in a phase of contraction rather than confidence: heightened suspicion of difference, attempts to reassert a singular national story, and a political atmosphere animated less by vision than by grievance and enforcement. Cultural life has not escaped this. Language, migration, race, and belonging are being pulled back into blunt, exclusionary frames, while […]
Categories
Strange Days
What strikes me most about the current president of the United States is a strange inversion that would be almost comic if it were not so consequential. He shows little regard for the role he occupies, scant respect for the law, and no evident commitment to the country beyond what it can deliver to him […]
Categories
Stranger Kings
Evil did not arrive with a plan. It arrived pre-installed, the natural orientation of relationally networked complexity at scale, settling into low-energy states and the familiar attractors of corruption, populism, and conflict. There are puppet-masters and greedy, demonic characters involved, certainly, but even they are mostly riding that prebuilt wave. They do not invent the […]
Categories
The Hand of Law
Law presents itself as a guardian of rights and social peace, but its core function is to preserve the legal order and the interests that dominate it. Rights are recognised only when they stabilise that order; when they challenge the hierarchy that sustains it, they are restricted or quietly ignored. Property is the central unit […]
