The Significance of Trump in the Age of Exception.

The limits and reality of counter-state violence is gestured at by Walter Benjamin in his Kantian Critique of Violence. We take it as obviously true, without conspiracy, that States only let us get away with what they can handle. This is because resistance is legal. 

A moment in radical left reality, say a march, or a parade, is oK if it is permitted. Therefore a moment outside its purview is the unpermitted march. Cops hate this; but chances are good that they will lead the entire way anyway, containing it from becoming an insurrection. The march or parade or legal protest becomes extra-legal when it turns into a riot, or an unlawful assembly, first; declared whimsically by the cops, first as unlawful (perhaps, which is to say not-necessarily), then as riot, then finally as abandoned insurrection. Yet, even Ferguson wasn't genuinely abandoned; it was left to be as such, as though this event! would eventually fizzle, thereby justifying further biopolitics. For the State there must not be an outside!

The paradox of Sovereignty, as outlined by Giorgio Agamben, is that there are few checks on the limits of power that the constituitive function of power maintain (and so), can legally undermine. The possibility of martial law, slowly eroded from legality, attests to the brute fact that the Sovereign can will whatever, come what may, against whomever may come to challenge. The outlaw who can, somehow, outrun the legality of the state and its imposition, is the one that can retain a moment of the state of nature, against that which, it seems, contains every possibility of violence in its orbit.  The contract that our European ancestors gave up, from administering justice themselves over to the one that would do it on our behalf--do we still believe this incredible proposition?--permits the state to will into reality whatever it likes, from "pacified/pacifying" means of violence in everyday police reality and maintenance, to the brute force of fiat law ex nihilo caught up in the concept of martial law. If, however, martial law in the microscopic merely entails the creative act of law, then every moment of police impunity carries this reality, making martial law the rule, and rarely the exception. 

Chance are good that Trump won't do much that his predecessors already were wont to do. His cronies, however, the alt-right that are dying for a chance to be accepted by Trump--at present his sin is a mere act of omission--have somehow been enabled to carry out the divisive work his own genesis as possibly-president required. The white-privilege protector who carried out a shooting for which he was absolved with his word: "self-defence," did so as though the state of nature wasn't really challenged, even though, importantly, the violent legality of the act as such, undermines the monopoly on violence of the Sovereign. Perhaps then what we witnessed here is a moment of doing the right thing by the lights of the Sovereign, on behalf of the Sovereign, which was forgiven without reprimand. Free Policing! Witness Leviathan!

I predict that Trump will do nothing extraneous with respect to growth in power, that unity will be the goal by way of biopolitical mastery (the ultimate goal being political docility). I propose that the divisive elements caught up in the origin of Trump, must be occluded, somehow, and yet that the state of exception as martial law (lawlessness) will be permissible everywhere so long as one acts only on the way to the divisions that already exist and already make life disturbing. Trump, then, is merely an intensified Obama. Under Obama we already saw the possibility that anyone deemed a terrorist could be thrown in jail without trial; we saw nothing done by a "Black" president for police powers that carry out racist shootings; under Trump we will see the term terrorist figure itself as indicating anyone that doesn't put America first, which is understandable, indeed reasonable for its citizens, and a total joke for members of other Sovereign nations. And we will probably see more police. But this was a long time coming. 

I also want to say that it is very possible that Trump functions to recuperate the radical right, a real threat to state sovereignty. These must then get a pass, just as the Black bloc is given a pass, for the most part. They must be punished, or seem to be on the whole and for the most part, but carrying out such acts must never be made impossible, for the obvious reason that people got to sublimate somehow, given repressed desires. If Trump never condones racist acts of the police (turning them instead to iterations of proper job-functioning) and sometimes ignores racist shootings so long as they can have some legal justification (in the above case, self-defence), then it will forever be the case that the white rebel is contained, and the ultimate legality of the USA is never overturned. A little goes a long way. That is, I bet Trump will never clean his robes of his origins because governmentality must contain and make docile every american citizen, even reactionaries. Let's hope the real racists never realize they've been duped...