Monthly Muse: 1/2025
Recapitulation, contemplation, provocation
Monthly Musings are published during the last week of every month. In each Monthly Muse, I recap content from the past month of Handful of Earth, offer some freewheeling reflections, and share a passage that I’ve found especially thought-provoking.
Here’s the January 2025 Monthly Muse.
Recapitulation: Published this month on Handful of Earth
Contemplation
This month, I wrote an article on the heightened tensions within Trumpworld (as the media has taken to calling it). This term is itself telling. It illustrates that Trumpism 2.0 is no longer synonymous with MAGA or America First principles. Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s advocacy of higher levels of elite migration to the United States in order to serve Big Tech demonstrates that Trumpworld contains powerful factions that stand in diametric opposition to the America First agenda (or understand what it means in a radically different way from the MAGA base). For more on this, see “Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy's Assault on the American People.”
Musk’s inauguration celebration speech received days of media attention due to what, for all intents and purposes, appeared to be two Nazi salutes. What commentators failed to mention was the audience reaction to the speech as a whole. When the camera pans the crowd, it is striking how few smiles are visible over the course of Musk’s short address. While his massive financial contributions undoubtedly contributed to Trump’s electoral victory, Musk’s obsession with going to Mars and grandiose rhetoric about “the future of civilization” couldn’t be further removed from the everyday concerns that animate the MAGA movement. Even the chants of “Elon, Elon” seem forced. Many audience members have a look of befuddlement on their faces during Musk’s speech.
Rather than Trumpworld, the increasingly bloated coalition surrounding Trump would be better described as Trumpworlds. Indeed, the likes of Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy occupy and represent entirely different worlds from the Trumpian base. While Musk’s money can temporarily mask these contradictions, it is only a matter of time before they cause even bigger ruptures, ruptures that bring into sharp relief the reality that Trumpworld is, in fact, a tenuously held together assemblage of worlds ready to be torn asunder at any moment.
Provocation
“The Darwinian/Galtonian evolutionary script wrote the everyday citizen completely out of the story. It had to be faced that there was no room at the policy table for common citizens, yet thanks to the dangerous power vested in the American electorate through its national founding documents, the full bite of a democratic society stood as a latent threat to the would-be scientific ruling classes.”
—John Taylor Gatto, The Underground History of American Education
For us in India, the current phase of Trump 2.0 seems to mirror the noise here in 2014 when Narendra Modi won the election. It’s like watching a rerun. Same same but different to use the Indian phrase.
If what happened here is any indication of which of the Trumpworlds will prevail or win, it would be all of them claiming that they have won. Hugely.
The business tycoons will end up making more money through protectionism and less competition + make less noise while they do it and the extreme right will make more noise, create mayhem, beat and lynch more than a few people and that will be their victory.
Let’s see how it goes.