Leopold Kohr and company will have to wait another week or two—sorry. I already know the name of the post: “Altered States.” But between PT, doctor’s appointments, knee twinges from unexpected quarters landing in an unexpected place, bathroom restorations and room re-painting, visits from friends, going to a Nats game yesterday, garden harvesting and food prep, and weather too wondrous to avoid some gratuitous relaxation, I just have not been able to invest the necessary time.
So in order to keep to our new Monday weekly schedule, we’ll do what I suggested we might some weeks ago: Restart, just for a little bit, the Age of Spectacle manuscript rollout since so much time has passed and so much has happened to make me fortify the thinking and writing that kick off the narrative—and no, I have not been able to keep true to my promise to myself not to let the manuscript deal with anything that happened after January 20, 2025. Just couldn’t do it. In any event, the newer version is a lot better than what I trotted out in April 2024.
Meanwhile, an announcement: The Spring 2025 (don’t ask…..) issue of The International Economy is just out and my symposium comment is included under the title “Those first to join the AI club will have deep regrets.” The whole symposium is pretty good, very diverse, much of it usefully thought-provoking—altogether well worth reading. Here it is if you’re interested.
In the Beginning (hmm….that has a nice ring to it…….)
First of all, I tweaked the book’s subtitle. It now reads, as a fair summary of the entire project: How a Recursive Confluence of Fragilized Affluence, the End of Modernity, Deep-Literacy Erosion, and Shock-Entertainment Technovelty Has Surrealized American Culture and Wrecked American Politics. The “Surrealized American Culture” part is the added phrase. I figured that since I emphasize the importance of the New Orality triggering the regression of so much of the culture back into a mythic consciousness/magical efficacy/charismatic leadership style kind of mindset, I had to get some reference to all that into the subtitle. No worries, through: Few editors will let me get away with a subtitle that long these days. There will be, or rather there may be, an argument over it.
So OK, as if Jackie Gleason were helping me out, “and away we go.”
The stars we are given. The constellations we make. That is to say, stars exist in the cosmos, but constellations are the imaginary lines we draw between them, the readings we give the sky, the stories we tell.
--Rebecca Solnit[1]
In 1968 John Barth published Lost in the Funhouse, a coming-of-age tale of a boy named Ambrose who loses the ability to find reality. Ambrose decides to spite what he cannot locate: “What the hell, reality is a nice place to visit but you wouldn’t want to live there,” he says to no one in particular, “. . . Reality is a drag.” As he was wont to do, Barth doubled up character and author, transmuting the fractured model of the theater of the absurd à la Beckett into words on paper. When Ambrose, who is Barth the same way Stephen Daedalus is James Joyce, can no longer wrap his mind around reality he realizes that everything he utters, or even thinks, turns instantaneously into fictions and then, as he continues, into fictions folded within fictions. He dares not leave off uttering, however, for articulating his fictions alone creates his “I” that, he fears, might disappear in a flash of pointlessness were he to stop.
By erasing the boundary between the world out there and the imagination in his head Barth illustrated what Rebecca Solnit was getting at, many years later, in Storming the Gates of Paradise; namely, that humans are pattern creators, pattern creation is art, and art is about feelings; hence no purely objective and dispassionate human perception of the world can exist. We can conceive of fully objective perception as a possibility and we can pursue it, but ultimately it teases us as a horizon—a place in the distance that continues to recede as we approach it. Thus Nietzsche 143 years ago in The Gay Science:
I have discovered for myself that the old humanity and animality, yea, the collective primeval age, and the past of all sentient being, continues to meditate, love, hate, and reason in me. . . . [A]mong all these dreamers, I also, the “thinker,” dance my dance.
Nietzsche understood, as have others before and since, that the distinction between what is fully real to us as living, breathing humans—which philosophers have long referred to out of the Germanic philosophical tradition as the Lebenswelt, the life-world—and what is an imaginative adumbration of the Lebenswelt is not as sharp and clear-cut as we typically suppose. Plenty of rabbit holes are out there, more than we think, and more diverse in appearance and tack than we appreciate. Everyday life in our primary framework—another way to say Lebenswelt without any Germanic insinuations—is subject to subtle and not-so-subtle forms of sabotage, by our own hand both knowingly and otherwise, and at the hands of others both permissively and not. That has always been so; it inheres in the nature of the human symbolic experience that defines our species. What is happening, to put it simply, is that the onrushing man-made environment in which Americans now live in the first quarter of the 21st century, punctuated by the onslaught of the cyberlution, has made the boundaries between what we take to be real and what we take to be not real far more permeable than they were heretofore.
Phenomenological principles can account for the growing lack of sharpness and help us understand the ways that normal experience has become more vulnerable to various forms of tampering. A precise way to summarize the case is to start with this statement by Erving Goffman from his later-career masterwork Frame Analysis:
. . .the real or actually happening seems to be very much a mixed class containing events perceived within a primary framework and also transformed events when they are identified in terms of their transformations.[2]
Goffman means simply that our primary frameworks, what we suppose to be the forces loose in the world at any normal quotidian moment, are real, and also real are bracketed experiences like attending a stage play when identified as a stage play, or whatever lamination of a primary framework they are. Just to be clear: Is a performance of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream real? Of course it is, when identified as a play, a play not incidentally that is per force modeled on behavior that makes sense in the Lebenswelt. (If it were not modeled on behavior that makes sense in the Lebenswelt it would not make any sense at all, not even fictive sense.) Is the activity within the play real from the lodestone of the Lebenswelt? No, of course not: It’s fictive. Now what about the play within the play in A Midsummer Night’s Dream? Ah, now we have what phenomenologists call a layering, or a lamination. The play within the play is real as a play within the play, but from the perspective of the Lebenswelt both are fictive, one being a lamination on top of the other.
The range of metaphorically constructed human social worlds, each “real whilst attended to” as William James put it, is diverse and capacious. Those worlds include not only clearly fictive frames like stage plays but also much subtler modelings. Political orders are laminations of clusters of primary-framework behaviors. International politics, certainly including diplomacy, is a further layering of the political lamination. So are espionage and counter-espionage as examples of competitive containment strategies; both express efforts to market perceptions and gain leverage by manipulating definitions of situations in others.
Except for situations in which others “contain” us without our catching on, we know intuitively when we move from the Lebenswelt to a lamination, for separate bracketing conventions attend them all. That is obvious in a play as the curtain opens and closes, less obvious but nonetheless mastered by typical adults in subtler kinds of framings. Our ability to slide easily and effortlessly in and out, up and down, multiple layers of lamination amid behaviors modeled on the Lebenswelt is truly stunning when one thinks about it. Which we rarely do, and which aids the process—since too much attention drawn to the cognitive anatomy of our phenomenological dexterity undermines its efficacy, just as heckling seeks to break frame and so downkey a laminated activity.
Why even briefly belabor these seemingly esoteric points at the nexus of phenomenological sociology and philosophy? Because in our present moment it isn’t esoteric; we cannot afford to let it be esoteric. Understanding social-cognitive anatomy, so to speak, has become critical to grasping what is happening in America right bloody now. What is happening, to be not too blunt about it, is that the Trump 2.0 Administration, supported by the enthusiastic credulity of the MAGA world, is attempting to substitute a fantasy-borne fictive version of reality for the Lebenswelt. Those relatively few who are fully aware of what is happening usually identify the framework of this self-serving fantasy fictive version of reality as a projectile form of reality-TV foisted upon the nation. And they adduce that it is working to the shocking degree it is because non-deep-reading screenhead brains have been routinized by their own entertainment habits to see everything not concretely pertaining to their lives as if it were a reality-TV episode.
That, too, is what the sum of the linked conspiracy theories hatched by MAGA conflict entrepreneurs and credulous others now comes to, and it is not that hard really to see how the wider culture impinges on politics. When the remaining readers among us pop their bubbles and realize that the clear majority of adult Americans now reads—when it reads anything beyond a menu or a street sign—at a sub-sixth grade level, and that the vast majority spend most of their waking lives staring at images on screens, absorbing one dumbed-down quick-hit distraction after another, it dawns suddenly and brightly that this situation, wild and wobbly in its novelty, cannot not affect politics.
When it dawns further that nearly all Americans get their “news” about politics through exactly the same communications media that transmit their unrelenting diet of entertainments—an ensemble of commercially available two-dimensional screens, constituting the digitized industrialization of information—little trills of nervous excitement tend to creep up the back of the newly aware neck, whether they know or remember what Marshall McLuhan said about medium and message or not.
Consider just one late summer 2025 example. On Friday, August 22 the Congressional Budget Office issued a report claiming, inter alia, that at current rates of accumulation tariff payments to the U.S. Treasury over ten years would amount to about $4 trillion. President Trump almost immediately set to misunderstand and distort the report as well as to fail to mention the parts of it he didn’t like. At 4:19 pm Trump sent out a Truth Social message claiming that:
. . .the Radical Left Representatives working at the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) have now admitted how incredible my Tariff strategy has been, saying that “Trump’s Tariffs reduce the deficit by $4 Trillion Dollars.” When I began my Tariff policy suggestions, they refused to acknowledge the potential SUCCESS that would be derived. Deficits are DOWN, Taxes are DOWN, Energy is DOWN, Prices generally are DOWN, the only things that are UP are, Take Home Pay, the Stock Market, and our Country, which is the “HOTTEST” anywhere in the World. Thank you for your attention to this matter!
Then on Monday, August 25 Trump claimed at a press conference that, “The tariffs came in at $4 trillion. The CBO, they just announced it. I told them that was going to happen, but they refused to give us credit for it. Now they’re giving us credit because the money is flowing in.” Before the end of the day the MAGA media line was that the $4 trillion was a done receipt, not an estimate of what might (very improbably) have been collected ten years down the line, and that all the money has already come off the Federal deficit.
As several fact-based-world observers pointed out, this was all fake fantasy wish-fulfillment turned willy-nilly into hogwash propaganda for the post-literate MAGA cultic true believers.[3] As usual, it worked. As Andrew Egger put it a few days earlier in commenting on a different issue,
. . . a critical mass of Americans are in such an advanced state of epistemic collapse that they have essentially given up on the idea that broad facts about the public—things . . . that can’t be felt or seen but can only be grasped as data—are knowable at all. The graphs, the numbers, the charts simply don’t matter. These voters either won’t ever see them in the first place, or, if they do, they’ll assume prima facie that the numbers are cooked. . . . It’s not merely that the old methods of political persuasion don’t work. For all intents and purposes, the old methods don’t even register. They might as well not be happening at all. If a piece of political content, whether it be reasonable argument or pure uncut horseshit propaganda, doesn’t exceed a certain threshold of emotional stimulation, it essentially doesn’t exist. . . . [4]
If we remind ourselves, yet again, that the entire edifice of contemporary U.S. politics is based on the triumph of a massive twin Big Lie about November 3, 2020 and January 6, 2021, we can see that taken together the whole effort of the MAGA White House and world to fabricate an ersatz reality as a substitute for the world that actually exists. We strain to appreciate the enormity of the presumption, for while it is structurally like the fictive fantasy of The Truman Show, it extends far, far beyond it: The essence of it is that Trump is trying to destroy the Lebenswelt, all of it, that any semi-sentient American might bump into. And in this unprecedented project Trump has many millions of more or less enthusiastic allies, fantasist conspiracy-addled non-readers who appear to be in willful retreat from the pesky real world in favor of a surreal one more to their liking.
Trump and his MAGA minions have not only been flooding the zone with shit at full blast now for a decade, but by more recently using his power to eliminate reliable sources of non-shit—like the Bureau of Labor Statistics acting as an objective arbiter of economic data, and by now possibly the election-records integrity of the National Archives[5]—he is trying to insinuate a form of Higher Disney Fiction, as Paul Fussell once described the Time-Life treatment of World War II in his Boy Scout Handbook, as though it were real and thus render what is real unreal.[6] Trump’s ambition here, whether he is actually aware of its magnitude or not, makes Neil Sheehan’s famous invocation of a “bright shining lie” look like a toddler fib.
Trump’s astonishing projectile-fantasy hubris is enough to suck the oxygen out of the room, but we must not let it, for it is not the proper focus of concern. The proper focus of concern is to understand why it seems to work. Despite all the whirlwinding storms that hit the nation after January 2025, Trump was more popular in August 2025 than he was in August 2017 at a comparable point in his first term. How can this be?
Let’s look at some evidence. When Trump repeatedly says things like “only I can fix it” he is uttering what should be an obvious parody of every tinpot dictator real and fictional in the history of the world, but his followers have so surrealized themselves that they evince no awareness that have been dragged into a parody. When he seeks out laws to break and courts to chest-bump in the process, but proclaims at the same time that “no one is above the law” and “I have the right to do anything I want to do; I’m President of the United States”—as he said during a televised Cabinet meeting on August 26—the contradictory hypocrisy drips thickly from the tumid summer air but MAGAheads don’t even notice it. When he said that states are just agents of the Federal government and have no say over how they hold elections, they just nodded like cows dipping for hay. When Gavin Newsom parodied via shitposting Trump’s ridiculous cult of fantasy the MAGA faithful managed entirely to miss both the point and the wit. Again: How can this be?
Somehow, the metaphorical corpus callosum that usually enables people to separate fact from fiction has gone missing in what has become a politically dominant chunk of the American demos. It seems to have been eviscerated by the routine mega-dosing of screen-based nonsense, set against the background of an insistent and still burgeoning tide of post-literacy, by what looks to be some 55-60 percent of American adults. When you see this rolling out before your eyes you have to pinch yourself to realize that, no, you are not watching an unusually realistic episode of The Smurfs, which inevitably featured zombified characters stumbling about in a trance. You are watching reality, but an historically anomalous kind of reality that has sabotaged its own Lebenswelt, the net result being a core disagreement over who is and who isn’t staring into a funhouse mirror. [7]
As 2025 began America was lost in a surrealist funhouse of its own inadvertent making. We the People were effusing battling contusions of emotion into our politics as perhaps never before, certainly not since the Civil War; whether much or any of this qualified as art remains debatable. Not merely coincident to the rushing national mood we stood as we battled in danger of tossing nearly 250 years of democratic self-rule—its warts, simplifications, and evasions and all--into the dustbin of human history.
A great deal of teeth gnashing and hand wringing naturally emerged over this dire prospect, growing more intense as the shock of events accelerated through the end of winter and into springtime. Yet few have stopped to ask an arresting and necessary question: Why do we want to save the American form of guard-railed presidential democracy—a presidential constitutional republic, in other words—when this particular arrangement has freely and fairly produced un-democratic, illiberal, and law-scorning outcomes in two of the past three presidential election cycles? What logic gives us sturdy hope that even if we survive the current malefactors of surreality, whether on account of their own political collapse or in some other way, We the People will do any better next time around?
Put a bit differently, the question looks like this: Is there something lodged deep in the American culture, as it has evolved in our man-made, post-pastoral era, that has rendered our political order no longer compatible with democracy, or with genuine self-government of any other description, as we think we understand it? Has something in the culture, or perhaps more specifically in the character of the man-made technological environment we have wrought, changed the relationships among democracy, liberalism, and rule of law—three related but ontologically distinct concepts, each with its own institutional embodiments, that have joined together to produce the relatively refined political life we have mostly enjoyed for so long? Or is the problem superficial, just a matter of tidying up a political system that has become a bit too decrepit and hence distorted for its and our own good?
If the problem is deeper in the culture then the question of the moment is not “What is wrong with Donald Trump and MAGAtry?” but rather “What is wrong with We the People that the American demos has now twice elected a person with an obviously severe personality disorder, not to mention a felony conviction the second time around, to the presidency?” That question translates in turn to another: “What is it exactly that has brought us to the present tipping point, if that is what it is?” Wrestling with these questions, in all their dimensions, is the purpose of this book.
[1] From Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics (University of California Press, 2008), p. 11
[2] Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (Harper & Row, 1974), p. 47.
[3] For example, Jonathan V. Last, “Trump’s ‘$4 trillion deficit reduction’ is fake news,” The Bulwark, August 26, 2025.
[4] Egger, “Blood for the Blood God,” The Bulwark, August 18, 2025.
[5] See my “White Magic at the National Archives: Post-January 20 AoS Chronicle No. 1, The Raspberry Patch (Substack), February 11, 2025.
[6] Fussell, The Boy Scout Handbook (Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 223.
[7] History records that societies do occasionally go mad; I discuss several examples in “The Present Madness,” The American Interest, June 15, 2020.