heathen earth Before you start to read this book, take this moment to think about making a donation to punctum books, an independent non-profit press @ https://punctumbooks.com/support If you’re reading the e-book, you can click on the image below to go directly to our donations site. Any amount, no matter the size, is appreciated and will help us to keep our ship of fools afloat. Contributions from dedicated readers will also help us to keep our commons open and to cultivate new work that can’t find a welcoming port elsewhere. Our adventure is not possible without your support. Vive la open-access. Fig. 1. Hieronymus Bosch, Ship of Fools (1490–1500) heathen earth: trumpism and political ecology. Copyright © 2017 by Kyle McGee. This work carries a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 International license, which means that you are free to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format, and you may also remix, transform and build upon the material, as long as you clearly attribute thew work to the authors (but not in a way that suggests the authors or punctum books endorses you and your work), you do not use this work for commercial gain in any form whatsoev- er, and that for any remixing and transformation, you distribute your rebuild under the same license. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ First published in 2017 by punctum books, Earth, Milky Way. https://punctumbooks.com ISBN-13: 978-0-9985318-8-5 ISBN-10: 0-9985318-8-X Library of Congress Cataloging Data is available from the Library of Congress Interior design: Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei Cover design: Adrian Warner & Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei Kyle McGee TRUMPISM AND POLITICAL ECOLOGY For Derek Taylor Alyson Madilyn and Lincoln Rose Contents Preface xi Acknowledgments xiii Introduction 15 1. The Meaning of Trump and The “End of Neoliberalism” 25 §1 The Center Cannot Hold 25 §2 Neoliberal-Nationalism and the Body of the Despot 32 §3 Dark Causalities 36 §4 The Metalanguage of Despotic Law 43 2. A Critique of Trumpist Political Ontology 49 §1 Justifying Critique 49 §2 “Down to Earth” 55 §3 Sovereign Division 61 3. Geocide and Geodicy 69 §1 The Darkest Causality 69 §2 Reprising the “Ends” 81 §3 Geocide Is a Nationalist Project 90 §4 War and Thanatopolitics 100 §5 Ens Realissimum 110 4. On Collective Obligation 117 §1 Dislocating Agency 117 §2 The Law of Nature and Nations 125 §3 Between Territory and Polity 135 Bibliography 145 Cases and Treaties 152 Addendum: Further Reading 153 Preface The nationalist retreat of which Trumpism is the uniquely American variant materializes at the intersection of two verti- goes: the vertigo of placelessness and the vertigo of landlessness. The first reflects the gradual decomposition and substitution of place by an abstract order of spatial extension: the technological and economic annulment of concrete distances, of organizing boundaries, and of recognizable identities summarized in the term globalization. The second marks the gradual disappear- ance of habitable land as a result of rising sea levels, increas- ing desertification and aridity, wildfires, droughts, floods, and unpredictable weather events attesting to the calamity of global warming. These phenomena — both equally political — are in- creasingly difficult to disentangle. In a sufficiently severe state of dizziness, the safety and familiarity of national borders and the empty promises of an as-seen-on-TV salesman proclaiming that, contrary to what elitist scientists may say, there is no need to change the way we live, can appear positively rational. Although I admit that Trump’s electoral victory shocked me on November 8, 2016, in looking back over the past ten weeks, I recognize that it ought not have. Not simply because I culpa- bly underestimated the frustration of voters, which I did, but more importantly because Trumpism represents an alternative to the forces undermining the very cosmology of the modern West from two opposing directions. The global economy, pin- nacle of modernization, had brought along a dark side of mas- sive inequality, corrupt institutions, colonial violence, and en- vironmental destruction, while the ecological collapse, nadir xi of modernity, threatened to undo the foundations of all states and all markets. With reality slowly fragmenting, it is only too obvious in this light that Trumpism and other nationalist move- ments would attract massive hordes of supporters. Promising to expel foreigners and restore unity and equality by taking power back from the global elites, while casting doubt on or utterly denying the validity of the climate science that calls ordinary means of subsistence and consumption radically into question, Trumpism can be seen as an antidote to the toxic combination of global markets and global warming. The irony, of course, is that Trumpism only responds to these dangers by doubling down on the reckless expansionist logic that gave rise to them in the first place. Consistent with the operation of the pharmakon, the antidote is itself a poison. There can be no doubt that the vertigo of placelessness and the vertigo of landlessness pose legitimate challenges to mod- ern political culture. They demand a response adequate to the gravity of the injustices they express. Trumpism, having seized control of the most powerful state apparatus on the planet, will exacerbate them. In a way, this is a book of regret and mourn- ing — not for the Globe we have lost but for the inexcusable fail- ure to remedy these injustices. But having written it (and fair warning: despite my incorrigible Leibnizianism, it does not end with optimism), I appreciate at least the immensity and the ne- cessity of the task ahead, above all of resistance and solidarity, struggle and invention. January 20, 2017 xii Acknowledgments This is not a book I wanted to write. But it imposed itself with the severest necessity late in the week of November 8, 2016, and did not let go until January 20, 2017. I am deeply grateful to Eileen Joy, who immediately embraced this unreasonably ambitious project and who has been a constant companion in the short but intense period of composition. Thanks also to the peer reviewers who generously tolerated this book’s disruption of their schedules, providing detailed, insightful comments. And thanks to punctum books and its staff more broadly for expediting the production process and for developing an admirably accessible publication platform that is nothing short of essential today. To my partner Courtney I owe everything, not least for her enthusiasm for this project and the many distressing but incisive late-night conversations that allowed the arguments presented here to take form. I am indebted to Adrian Warner and Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei, who designed the cover and rightly chal- lenged me to remember who the real enemy is. This book’s rapid gestation prevented me from testing most of the arguments pre- sented in workshops and conferences. But much of what follows is an outgrowth of research that I have been fortunate to pre- sent to several communities of remarkable scholars, including in workshops hosted by the Hong Kong University Law School, the University of Glasgow Law School, and Sciences Po. In par- ticular, thanks to Scott Veitch, Daniel Matthews, Emilios Chris- todoulidis, Bruno Latour, and Thomas Tari for organizing those events, and to their participants. xiii Introduction Th is brief volume of four short essays, composed in the period between November 9, 2016, and January 20, 2017, is my attempt to channel and redirect my frustration, disbelief, and rage fol- lowing the 2016 us presidential election. I did not support either option off ered the American public — neither the continuation of global market imperialism anticipated under a Clinton re- gime nor the rebirth of authoritarian sovereignty anticipated under a Trump regime — but I could not, as of November 8, 2016, even imagine that more than a vocal but relatively small pocket of mostly rural voters could cast their ballots in favor of global-warming denialism, overt racism, misogyny, ableism, and religious intolerance, nuclear rearmament, and near certain international confl ict in the Middle East and beyond arising from an armistice with Putin’s Russia and a mafi a-like insistence on protection payments from NATO allies, even with widening income gaps and intensifying socio-economic stratifi cation. Th is failure is of course emblematic of the political conjuncture into which Trump reached, and is not by any means confi ned to the us political culture. Brexit and the increasingly plausi- ble fragmentation of the European Union, France’s Marine Le Pen and the Front National party’s continued ascent as well as that of other Euroskeptic, anti-immigrant, nationalist par- ties in Europe, many bankrolled by Russian interests, all tes- tify to the right-wing capture of populist energies that, to hear Trump supporters tell it, have for too long gone ignored by the liberal ruling elite. My naiveté in failing to take Trump suffi - ciently seriously underscores not only the validity of the claim that “educated coastal elites” have utterly failed to understand the circumstances and the perceptions of a substantial number 15 heathen earth of their compatriots, but also the urgency with which existing political institutions and alliances must be reinvented. Bruno Latour is correct in stating that “our incapacity to foresee has been the main lesson of this cataclysm: how could we have been so wrong? […] It is as if we had completely lacked any means of encountering those whom we struggled even to name: the ‘uneducated white men,’ the ones that ‘globalization left behind’; some even tried calling them ‘deplorables.’”1 But the voting patterns, which remain opaque, defy easy de- mographic explanation: it is clear that the mobilization of “un- educated white men” does not explain the outcome.