Olivier Jutel

The insurgency and ascent of right-wing populism globally has radically ruptured the liberal democratic and internationalist consensus that has been rhetorically constructed under neoliberalism. The experts and cus- todians of this consensus and attendant democratic processes, drawn from the fields of journalism, academia and politics, have been rendered impo- tent by the populist’s direct appeal to a mediatized public. The symbolic violence of Trump’s populist jouissance has rallied the professional class to reinscribe their definitional power over this series of disorienting polit- ical events. Thus fake news and Russian disinformation have become the central preoccupations of the journalistic field in staging a defence of its cultural capital and rearticulating its privileged position as arbiter of truth. The field’s investment in Russia-gate represents a disavowal of the political; externalizing the crisis on to a corrupting and subversive agent that can be excised through the processes of truth-seeking and cyber-security analyt- ics. It has thus fallen to a complex of journalists, academic research centres, think tanks and policy entrepreneurs to discern the hand of nefarious Rus- sian influence behind all social forces that might disrupt the definitional power of professionals. The panic over fake news and Russian subversion perpetuates the post-political illusion of data-informed mastery over con- tingent political forces and “truth”, while simultaneously deploying the cultural capital of journalism, social science and academia towards digital censorship.

This chapter will consider the way the transformation of media values and political economy has driven the resurgence of right-wing populism in America. Broadcast media have been central to American right-wing populism and movement conservatism in the last thirty years. Fox News and conservative personalities from Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Alex Jones do not simply represent a new political and media voice but embody the convergence of politics and media in which affect and enjoyment are the central values of media production. The consumption of Fox News is not a dispassionate exercise drawing on critical faculties, but an affective investment in movement politics and branded conservatism. This audience spans traditional and new media forms as an individuated public primed to the populist politics of affect and alienation. This has been a fecund space for media entrepreneurs and right-wing populists who use access to politicized, conservative audiences to make an end-run around the traditional disciplines of politics and journalism. Donald Trump is the synthesis of a media
politics in which affective intensity and enjoyment are the principle political-economic values. He is not simply a media-savvy showman; he offers himself as a subject of enjoyment and elicits affective identification.

‘Everything that we’ve been sold about the democratic nature of the internet has always been a marketing pitch.’ Yasha Levine on the military origins of the internet, on data modelling and technocratic government, and why the Cambridge Analytica scandal was good for Facebook.

In the current conflagration it makes more sense to think of American liberalism as a cultural habitus or affect than a consistent ethico-political project. The cultural mourning of Barack Obama’s absence from the White House does not come from a sense of a great ideological project thwarted but the loss of how it made liberals “feel” to have Barack and Michelle at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. The dignity of the office was never greater for liberals with the tempered, professorial and historic figure of Obama appealing to our better selves. This habitus eschews ideology for process, compromise and the promise of meritocracy. It is this transcendent virtue, which is held to ennoble political institutions and realize America’s promise. This uniquely American and deluded optimism is mixed with a biting cynicism towards those that would use politics to transform society. The socialism of Sanders and the fascism of Trump are seen as twin evils. Wielding this cynical knowingness marks one as a member of a technocratic, managerial or cultural elite that gets how things “really work.” This self-satisfied enlightened class is the rational “fact-based community” staring down Yeats’ impassioned worst. The domain of politics does not require antagonistic ideological struggle but simply the intervention of the enlightened drawing upon their critical faculties to solve problems.

The election of Donald Trump is a catastrophe that no accelerationist hypothesis can justify. The principle of internationalism, neoliberal or otherwise, has been dealt a devastating blow at a time when the world faces spiralling climate and migration crises. Domestically, he has mobilised, however chaotically, the most retrograde forces in American society, who experience through him a carnivalesque transgression in ‘Making America Great Again’ one tweet, post and triggered liberal at a time.

While Trump-cheering suburbanites may lack a Brownshirt discipline, reinvigorated domestic forces of repression – from the police to Homeland Security agency ICE – give his fascism some legs. Events in Charlottesville and the pardoning of Joe Arpaio underline the empowerment of ethno-nationalists and Trump’s willingness to incite violence when his back is against the wall. Trump is useful in demonstrating the libidinal truth of the conservative movement: a desire to wield an oligarchic power as part of an exceptional group licensed to lash out at their enemies, whether they be minorities, feminists, migrants or the left. Trump has no particular political talent other than to act as a pure medium for these unrestrained conservative pathologies; as such, he offers the left our historic moment.

At this point, it would seem that some version of ‘socialism or barbarism’ would be the undeniable political calculus. Instead, the left has been thwarted by a liberalism more invested in preserving its fantasies and nightmares than confronting a responsibility to history. A resistance of sorts has been born, but one that reveals the libidinal deadlock between liberalism and its enemy. For the American liberal, Trump’s election has universalised a struggle between educated, science-loving, progressive technocrats and all of the beasts of base political passion – from populists, fascists and the alt-right to social democrats, self-described ‘dirtbag leftists’, antifa and communists. Nothing best captures this fallacious political division then the coinage ‘alt-left’, used by liberals and Trump alike to render socialism analogous to fascism. Against these imagined political forces liberals cling to the fantasy of rational compromise and adorn themselves with the moniker ‘the resistance’ as exercises in negative identity only made meaningful by the urgent threat of Trump as an unprecedented evil.

The emergence of Donald Trump as president of the United States has defied all normative liberal notions of politics and meritocracy. The decorum of American politics has been shattered by a rhetorical recklessness that includes overt racism, misogyny, conspiracy and support for political violence. Where the Republican Party, Fox News, Beltway think-tanks and the Koch brothers have managed their populist base through dog-whistling and culture wars, Trump promises his supporters the chance to destroy the elite who prevent them from going to the end in their fantasies. He has catapulted into the national discourse a mixture of paleo-conservatism and white nationalism recently sequestered to the fringes of American politics or to regional populisms. Attempts by journalists and politicians during the campaign to fact-check, debunk and shame Trump proved utterly futile or counter-productive. He revels in transgressing the rules of the game and is immune to the discipline of his party, the establishment and journalistic notions of truth-telling. Trump destabilizes the values of journalism as it is torn between covering the ratings bonanza of his spectacle and re-articulating its role in defence of liberal democracy. I argue here that Trump epitomizes the populist politics of enjoyment. Additionally liberalism and its institutions, such as journalism, are libidinally entangled in this populist muck. Trump is not simply a media-savvy showman: he embodies the centrality of affect and enjoyment to contemporary political identity and media consumption. He wields affective media power, drawing on an audience movement of free labour and affective intensity to defy the strictures of professional fields.

The New Zealand Internet Party tested key notions of affective media politics. Embracing techno-solutionism and the hacker politics of disruption, Kim Dotcom's party attempted to mobilise the youth vote through an irreverent politics of lulz. While an electoral failure, the party's political discourse offers insights into affective media ontology. The social character of affective media creates the political conditions for an antagonistic political discourse. In this case affective identification in the master signifier " The Internet " creates a community of enjoyment, threatened by the enemy of state surveillance as an agent of rapacious jouissance. The Internet Party's politics of lulz was cast as a left-wing techno-fix to democracy, but this rhetoric belied a politics of cyberlibertarianism. Dotcom's political intervention attempted to conflate his private interests as a battle that elevates him to the status of cyberlibertarian super-hero in the mould of Edward Snowden or Julian Assange.

This article examines the centrality of affective media production to contemporary American populism with a case study of the right-wing broadcaster Glenn Beck. The rise of far-right media and Donald Trump in social media spaces demonstrates the convergence of the economic and political logic of affect. In soliciting the affective and collaborative labour of users, affective media necessarily deploys discourses of social transformation, autonomy and critical knowingness. Beck’s show exemplifies this logic with Beck functioning as a leader of the Tea Party movement who perform ‘free labour’ for Fox News and Beck’s own media empire, while experiencing this as a form of revolutionary education. Where this audience movement speaks to the political ontology of affective media is in the return of a fetishistic ‘symbolic efficiency’. In foreshadowing Trump, Beck articulates an antagonistic division of the social with a populist community of jouissance and individuation both threatened and constituted by the rapacious enemy.

John Key, the Prime Minister of New Zealand and former forex trader for Bank of America’s ‘wealth management’ company Merrill Lynch, is a remarkable politician. His importance extends beyond the Antipodes: Key is chairman, for instance, of the International Democrat Union, an association of leading conservative parties from sixty countries, most likely because he presents a viable model for a Third Way conservatism (an identity politics reboot of ‘compassionate conservatism’) that does not betray his class interests.

This article looks at the challenge posed to the liberal field of journalism by Tea Party populism and Fox News’ attempt to claim the cultural capital of journalism. The Tea Party have defied expectations of a political and rhetorical normalization, declaring liberalism and the New York Times as iredeemable enemies of the populist people. The Times’ coverage of the Tea Party, analyzed in this article, assumes an importance beyond
merely covering a political story as it articulates the present state of the field and its understanding of the political. What this author finds is a normative liberal universalist
interpretation of the Tea Party movement between the pessimissm of Lippmann or the redemptive humanism of Dewey. The populists are either treated as irrational pseudo-
political actors or the credibility of the field is bestowed upon them as the redemptive embodiment of democracy. Neither approach is able to explain populism’s immutable antagonism at an ontological level or the persistence of the Tea Party’s fetishized notion of an America reconciled in private property.

The emergence of the Tea Party as a specifically mediatized, populist movement owing its success to its close affiliation with Fox News, is emblematic of the new political economy of the media field. Within the mediatized social space, populist notions of ‘authenticity’ have become the economic and cultural capital of the media field, superseding the liberal unified public. Audiences no longer merely consume media, but actively construct the very communication networks that are used by media corporations to scrutinize the minutia of personal taste preferences. In incorporating forms of free audience labor, the media simultaneously perfect the audience commodity while opening up the field of power to the social logics of difference and equivalence which constitute the political. Fox News viewers do not simply consume the news but generate it as Tea Party protestors. This new logic of commodification and the incorporation of free labor signal the positive agency of mediatized subjects.

The election of Barack Obama corresponding with the dramatic implosion of the neo-liberal world order of finance, represents a dramatic return of history as attempts are made to forge the new consensus of global capitalism. The financial crisis has come to represent the culmination of Third Way neo-liberalism with Obama signifying the commodity logic and emancipatory potential of the new spirit of capitalism. Obama’s biography has allowed for a self-confident re-articulation of American imperial power, while fetishizing a civil society notion of transformation that has eclipsed the anti-capitalist left. Resistance to Obama’s vision of a reconciled America, leading the moral correction of capitalism, has come in the form of a right wing populist campaign of delegitimization. The Tea Party populists speak to the return of the political and the ontological necessity of antagonism as they present themselves as the only radical alternative to actually existing neo-liberalism.

The global food crisis of 2008 presented the neo-liberal development model with its sharpest international challenge since the Asian economic crisis of the late 1990s. Responding to the crisis, many of the world’s poor vociferously protested their condition, forcing world leaders, international institutions and the global media to take stock of the systemic failure. This article is concerned with gauging the response of neo-liberal discourse to the crisis as articulated through the global media and institutions. Political Economy of the Media and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), are here utilized as a means to identify the hierarchy of actors and the political formations that are mobilized in response to the crisis, at the level of international projection. The article argues that what emerges from the food crisis is a defining causal structure of economism/urgency/new consensus, which manages to simulate radical self-reflexivity while securing further terrain for the expansion of neo-liberalism.

In April of both 2007 and 2008, Fisher & Paykel an iconic New Zealand manufacturer, closed production facilities in East Tamaki and Mosgiel, with the loss of over 900 jobs, for offshore relocation. The departure of a nationally iconic company provides the ideal conditions for gauging the level of discursive supremacy neo-liberalism enjoys in the New Zealand media. What this article finds, however, is that far from having to defend itself, neo-liberal discourse in the New Zealand context is able to define the parameters of debate, monopolise definitional power and engage in radical re-conceptualisations of subjectivity and politics.

The global food crisis of 2008 presented the neo-liberal development model with its sharpest international challenge since the Asian economic crisis of the late 1990s. Responding to the crisis, many of the world’s poor vociferously protested their condition, forcing world leaders, international institutions and the global media to take stock of the systemic failure. This article is concerned with gauging the response of neo-liberal discourse to the crisis as articulated through the global media and institutions. Political Economy of the Media and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), are here utilized as a means to identify the hierarchy of actors and the political formations that are mobilized in response to the crisis, at the level of international projection. The article argues that what emerges from the food crisis is a defining causal structure of economism/urgency/new consensus, which manages to simulate radical self-reflexivity while securing further terrain for the expansion of neo-liberalism.

The sense that one’s time is inferior to what has preceded it is a lament that propels his- tory and allows one to vicariously experience past glories. As Marx wrote in his essay ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon’, we ‘anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honoured disguise and bor- rowed language.’ In this centenary of the October Rev- olution, gesturing towards the ideal of com- munism runs the gamut from dank memes and internecine online struggles to the odd meeting (or, futilely, writing and reading Lacanian Marxist tracts about the necessity of a Leninist party). In these e orts, it’s hard not to feel hapless conspirators in the stupid- ity of a post-ideological age, one in equal parts risible and perilous. And yet, in 2017, ‘Russia’ – as a metonym for both communism and a range of contradictory evils – is once more at the centre ...

This article looks at the Glenn Beck Program as an example of affective media production. In a media environment where cats, self-expressive modes of discourse and “inspirational response to bully” videos drive media consumption and internet traffic, affect functions as a central political and economic logic. The principle economic logic is the audience commodity performing affective labour. Beck’s viewers produce the spectacle of Tea Party protest for Fox and consume Beck’s program, reading list and end-times commodities as part of revolutionary preparedness (Author 2013). This is simultaneously a question of political ontology as affective media draws us into social and libidinal circuits of desire. Accounts of affective labour and media produsage bear the traces of Hardt and Negri’s teleology of the multitude: the social nature of affective media production eludes capitalist control and opens new spaces for radical democracy. Beck and the Tea Party problematize humanist assumptio...

The remarkable ascendancy of Barack Obama to the presidency of the United States of America, in the shadows of the financial crisis, was in no small part due to the effective discursive response to the ideological crisis of American neo-liberalism. With the disgracing of the once venerable Allan Greenspan and the irreconcilable gap between a strident neoliberalism and the lived experience of working Americans, Obama’s victory marked a moment of openness in the battle for America’s political trajectory. The Obama campaign presented itself as a moral correction to the worst excesses of capitalism and adventurism under George W. Bush. This success was crucially dependent on formulating aspirational discourses about the redemptive qualities of American power and global leadership as well as the emancipatory and transformative power of a morally restored capitalism. It is in this critical ideological maneuver that Obama can be seen as the Third Way neo-liberal par excellence. In dealing ...

The rise of blockchain as a techno-solution in the development sector underscores the critical imbalances of data power under ‘computational capitalism’ ( Beller, 2018 ). This article will consider the political economy of techno-solutionist and blockchain discourses in the developing world, using as its object of study blockchain projects in Pacific Island nations. Backed by US State Department soft power initiatives such as Tech Camp, these projects inculcate tech-driven notions of economic and political development, or ICT4D, while opening up new terrains for data accumulation and platform control. Blockchain developers in search of proof of concept have found the development sector a fecund space for tech experimentation as they leverage a desire for tech-development and exploit regulatory weakness. The material implications of blockchain projects and discourse have been to create governance solutions which bypass the developing world state as a largely corrupting intermediary. ...

This chapter will consider the way the transformation of media values and political economy have driven the resurgence of right wing populism in America. Broadcast media have been central to American right-wing populism and movement conservatism in the last thirty years. Fox News and conservative personalities from Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Alex Jones do no simply represent a new political and media voice but embody the convergence of politics and media in which affect and enjoyment are the central values of media production. The consumption of Fox News is not a dispassionate exercise drawing on critical faculties, but an affective investment in movement politics and branded conservatism. This audience spans traditional and new media forms as an individuated public primed to the populist politics of affect and alienation. This has been a fecund space for media entrepreneurs and right-wing populists who use access to politicized, conservative audiences to make an end-run around the traditional disciplines of politics and journalism. Donald Trump is the synthesis of a media-politics in which affective intensity and enjoyment are the principle political economic values. He is not simply a media savvy showman, he offers himself as a subject of enjoyment and elicits affective identification.

Introduction The emergence of Donald Trump as president of the United States has defied all normative liberal notions of politics and meritocracy. The decorum of American politics has been shattered by a rhetorical recklessness that includes overt racism, misogyny, entertaining wild conspiracies, insulting veterans, and joking about assassinations. Where the Republican Party, Fox News, Beltway think-tanks and the Koch brothers have managed their populist base through dog-whistling and culture wars, Trump offers the populists a chance to destroy the elite who prevent them from going to the end in their fantasies. He has catapulted into the national discourse a mixture of paleo-conservatism and white-nationalism historically sequestered to the fringes of American politics or to regional populisms. Attempts by journalists and politicians during the campaign to fact-check, debunk and shame Trump proved utterly futile or counter-productive. He revels in transgressing the rules of the game and is immune to the discipline of his party, the establishment and journalistic notions of truth-telling. Trump destabilizes the values of journalism as it is torn between covering the ratings bonanza of the Trump spectacle and re-articulating its role in defence of liberal-democracy. This essay will argue that Trump epitomizes the populist politics of enjoyment. Additionally liberalism and its institutions, such as journalism, are libidinally entangled in this populist muck. Trump is not simply a media savvy showmen, he embodies the centrality of affect and enjoyment to contemporary political identity and media consumption. He wields affective media power, drawing on an audience movement of free labour and affective intensity to defy the strictures of professional fields.

This article examines the emergence of right-wing broadcaster of Glenn Beck as a case study of affective media production. Affect is central to the political and economic logic of contemporary media production. In soliciting the affective and collaborative labour of audiences and users affective media necessarily deploys discourses of social transformation, autonomy and critical knowingness. Beck’s show exemplifies this logic with Beck functioning as a leader of the Tea Party movement who perform ‘free labour’ (Terranova 2004) for Fox News, and Beck’s own media empire, while experiencing this as a form of revolutionary education. Where this audience movement speaks to the political ontology of affective media is in the return of a fetishistic ‘symbolic efficiency’ (Dean 2010a, 5). Beck articulates an antagonistic division of the social with a populist community of jouissance and individuation both threatened and constituted by the rapacious enemy.

The New Zealand Internet Party tested key notions of affective media politics. Embracing techno-solutionism and the hacker politics of disruption, Kim Dotcom's party attempted to mobilize the digital natives through an irreverent politics of lulz. While an electoral failure the party's political discourse offers insights into affective media ontology. The social character of affective media creates the political conditions for an antagonistic political discourse. In this case affective identification in the master signifier " The Internet " creates a community of enjoyment threatened by the enemy of state surveillance as an agent of rapacious jouissance. The Internet Party's politics of lulz was cast as a left-wing techno-fix to democracy, but this rhetoric belied a politics of cyberlibertarianism. Dotcom's political intervention attempted to conflate his private interests as a battle that elevates him to the status of cyberlibertarian super-hero in the mold of Edward Snowden or Julian Assange.

For those looking for an escape from Trump’s America, New Zealand appears to be a choice destination to ride out the catastrophe, with historic achievements like the first welfare state, a robust anti-nuclear movement successfully staring down the United States, and the Waitangi tribunal that monitors the government’s progress on keeping its obligations to the Maori. Yet, fantasies born out of one’s own political desperation do not tend to hold up well under scrutiny.

Angela Nagle has written an indispensable book that allows both the extremely online- and meme-illiterate to grasp the IRL implications of the online culture wars. From the rise of Trump as a lulzy agent of base enjoyment and unrestrained conspiracy, to the collapse of meaning in these perilously ridiculous times, all are products of an ascendant online culture which privileges affect and transgression. Nagle navigates a sea of anime Nazis, gamers, white nationalists, masturbation abstainers and violent misogynists in mapping the contours of online reaction and fascism. What is essential and most controversial in her thesis is the symbiosis between what we can call the ‘Tumblr liberal-left’ and the alt-right. Both are products of an online cultural vanguardism that has been lauded by techno-utopians, nominally leftist academics and journalists alike. Nagle wields a forceful critique of the online left’s aestheticised resistance as both self-satisfied and lacking the dynamism to undercut the alt-right’s discourse of modern alienation, however nonsensical. This book is not an attempt at righteously slam dunking on the basement dwelling nerds of the alt-right or rehashing the excesses of campus identitarians. Instead it takes on the ideological deadlocks of the left that have been masked by the tech-fetishism of late capitalism.

The only thing more disempowering then watching Donald Trump’s surrealist acceleration of American revanchist conservatism is relying upon the Democratic Party to lead the #Resistance. After Clinton’s misreading of the electorate and colossal failure one would hope that even the most willing corporate servant might understand, even if only cynically, the necessity of a left-populist tack.

America is about to choose a president from the two most unpopular politicians in modern history. The Democrats have chided the Left and the ‘Bernie or Bust’ crowd for still not being ‘with her’ in the existential struggle against fascism. But it is worth considering how liberalism’s anti-fascism covers a libidinal lack. That is, an inability to define or, in Lacanian terms, ‘enjoy’ their political identity but through this fascist threat. Liberals are clearly not principled anti-fascists, the geopolitical compromises are too numerous to count, and there is an obvious cynical PR/fundraising logic to the fascist threat: ‘Can you spare $5 to defeat fascism?’ However, liberals are emotionally invested in the idea that they are the ones who can beat back the scourge of fascism. They construct anti-fascism as a class project but self-identify as the class of elites and experts that fascism uses to obfuscate actual class struggle.

Expect to hear an uptilt in praise for the Bernie Sanders campaign in the coming weeks from the liberal commentariat in the build-up to the Democratic Convention in Philadelphia. The Sanders campaign has elicited remarkable terror and concern trolling from liberals who like progressive ideas in theory but evidently not in practice. In order to beat back his advance it has been necessary to red-bait, invent the ‘BernieBro’, call in some favours from New York Times editors, pardon the banks for their role in the GFC and stalk the elusive creature that is the Hillary socialist. But with his eventual defeat, all of the spectacular fails of the party and punditry can be forgiven in the ritual rebirth through the primary process. My God, how liberals love process. As a loser, Sanders can be a liberal hero, a testament to big-tent neoliberalism as the party consumes his eccentric youthful wing. ‘See, the system works!’

New draft manuscript on the crisis of digital teleologies in the era of post-Truth politics. The digital and network triumphalism, that was presumed to empower to the technocratic class, has enabled digitally mediated reaction in the form of Trump. Key to these teleologies was an affect determinism in which the coalescence of affective energies was hailed as enabling civic minded collaboration and new creative political "becomings" (in the Deleuzian sense). This manuscript takes on two developments as a critique of this affect determinism. First, the return of paranoia and trauma in the form of cyber warfare and second, the attempt of blockchain technology to recapitulate the teleology of computation as truth and a first order social value. The turn of the great affect scholar Brian Massumi to blockchain as a revolutionary technology is illustrative of an techno-affect accelerationism that I wish to critique by way of Lacanian affect theory.

Blockchain has emerged as a master-signifier for a range of futursist and techno-solutionist discourses as a technology unifying and mediating economic, social and political life. The encrypted distributed ledger system that undergirds cryptocurrencies has come to stand in for the promise of smart cities, “web 3.0”, participatory financial services and all manner of governance processes. From the vagaries and radical subculture of cryptocurrencies blockchain entrepreneurs have emerged wielding considerable venture capital , academic resources  and media interest  in the attempts to sell blockchain as the vanguard technology of a new information age. Popular culture and futurist representations of the blockchain have ranged from libertarian escapism  to a rekindling of the socialist imaginary . Key to the dissociation of the blockchain from the radicalism of cryptocurrencies has been the pivot towards the development and aid sector. This article will consider how blockchain technology and discourse operates within an existing political economy of information and global asymmetries of computational power, using as its object of study the emergence of blockchain projects in Pacific Island nations.

Recasting the radical conjuncture of Trumpian populism as a question of fake news and subversion is a way to both re-inscribe the field’s cultural capital in social science terms. The belief in a data-driven vantage above the chaotic forces of the social originates in the Cold War social science methods that informed both counter-insurgency network surveillance and precision/data journalism. With the failure of utopian notions of data production the paranoid anti-communism behind the computational view of the social has returned. Techno-metaphors of the social have proliferated in order to reinscribe the expertise and truth claims of a technocratic habitus. In reclaiming the centre explosive political forces and radical critiques of power have become data points that signal a social pathogen. The cultural capital of academia, think-tanks and journalism have been deployed in constructing a subversion monitoring infrastructure which designates “fake news” and Russian bots while algorithmically suppressing and de-platforming alternative media both right and left. The cost of “saving” truth and the field of journalism is the subsumption of its autonomy to the field of power as the national security state and giant tech corporations function as the guarantors of truth. This new infrastructure of truth is a precise demonstration that claims to universal, autonomous and transcendent ideals are in the final instance products of the field of power.

The Lacanian Left critique of neoliberal post-politics, and its symptom populism, has been in equal parts prescient and indispensible for contextualizing the current crisis of liberal-democracy. From Mouffe's radical agonistic democracy (2005), Laclau's embrace of populism as politics tout court (2005) and Žižek's paeans to left universalism (2008) there is a foregrounding of the ontological necessity of antagonism and the libidinal in politics. The neoliberal triumphalism which consigned both the socialist left and the populist right to the margins as mere remnants of history, is now faced with Trump, Brexit and an international alliance of insurgent reaction. The evacuation of 'the political' (2005) from politics has allowed the far-right to mobilize alienated and individuated publics of jouissance. Unable to articulate an emancipatory and affirmative vision of politics liberalism has become libidinally dependent on the populist threat, negatively defining itself against the barbarians at the gate. And yet with each " final " act of anti-populist resistance liberalism finds itself beleaguered and ceding its universalist values. The grotesque and farcical character of Donald Trump is a precise rendering of the nightmare emerging from liberalism's libidinal investment in post-politics, rationalism and a technocratic habitus. This chapter will consider the current crisis of American liberalism as derived from post-politics and the disavowal of the lack inscribed in political identity. Where the logic of symbolic castration forces a confrontation with trauma, antagonism and enjoyment; liberalism replaces antagonism with a drive that disavows the lack. The liberalism of Hillary Clinton was defined by the supremacy of facts and concern for rational discourse in the pursuit of compromise, not as the basis for democratic participation and empowerment, but as ends in and of themselves. Contemporary American liberalism has elevated a technocratic habitus in the place of an antagonistic ethico-political identity. This habitus marks one as above-the-fray in command of the " facts " with privileged access to " the way things really work ". The existence of social problems does not indicate irreducible class and political conflict but simply the fact that the intellectual resources of the technocratic class have yet to be deployed. The promise, and subsequent failure, of Silicon Valley 'techno-solutionism' (Morozov, 2013) represents the apogee of this liberal post-politics as the most rapacious rent-seeking corporations manage to stand in for deliberative democratic ideals and community empowerment. In the face of the obscene revanchist populism of Trump the Clinton campaign clung to a tech and data fetishism that would supersede an absent political core while somehow managing the indeterminacy of the political. The scope and consequences of Clinton's failure simply cannot be accounted for in the liberal symbolic universe. Within a matter of months American liberalism has swung wildly from a data-informed surety to paranoia and psychosis in order to avoid a confrontation with the traumatic core of political identity. Trump cannot be explained as a symptom of popular alienation, Democratic party corruption or the fecklessness of the technocratic elite. Both Trump and the Bernie Sanders-left that would fight him in populist terms represent the intrusion of the remnants of history and foreign subversion orchestrated by 'the secret agent who is stealing social jouissance from us' (Žižek, 1997: 43); the Russians. " Russiagate " has become the means by which American liberals have attempted to preserve a technocratic authority