[...] The great danger is that, time and time again, the storm of rage that builds up gets defused and coopted into yet another election campaign. We fool ourselves into believing that the change we want will come with fresh elections and a new president or prime minister at the helm of the same old system. Of course, it is important to bounce the old bastards out of office and bounce new ones in, but that can’t be the only bucket into which we pour our passion. Frankly, as long as we continue to view the planet as an endless “resource,” as long as we uphold the rights of individuals and corporations to amass infinite wealth while others go hungry, as long as we continue to believe that governments do not have the responsibility to feed, clothe, house, and educate everyone—all our talk is mere posturing. Why do these simple things scare people so much? It is just common decency. Let’s face it: the free market is not free, and it doesn’t give a shit about justice or equality.

I am against unctuous injunctions and prescriptions from above to resistance from below. That’s ridiculous, isn’t it? Oppressors telling the oppressed how they would like to be resisted? Fighting people will choose their own weapons. For me, the question of armed struggle versus passive resistance is a tactical one, not an ideological one. For example, how do indigenous people who live deep inside the forest passively resist armed vigilantes and thousands of paramilitary forces who surround their villages at night and burn them to the ground? Passive resistance is political theater. It requires a sympathetic audience. There isn’t one inside the forest. And how do starving people go on a hunger strike?

In certain situations, preaching nonviolence can be a kind of violence. Also, it is the kind of terminology that dovetails beautifully with the “human rights” discourse in which, from an exalted position of faux neutrality, politics, morality, and justice can be airbrushed out of the picture, all parties can be declared human rights offenders, and the status quo can be maintained.

I don’t believe that the current supporters of empire are supporters of empire in general. They support the American empire. In truth, captalism is the new empire. Capitalism run by white capitalists. Perhaps a Chinese empire or an Iranian empire or an African empire would not inspire the same warm feelings? “Imperial thinking,” as you call it, arises in the hearts of those who are happy to benefit from it. It is resisted by those who are not. And those who do not wish to be.

Empire is not just an idea. It is a kind of momentum. An impetus to dominate that contains within its circuitry the inevitability of overreach and self-destruction. When the tide changes, and a new empire rises, the managers will change, too. As will the rhetoric of the old managers. And then we will have new managers, with new rhetoric. And there will be new populations who rise up and refuse to be managed.

I also think we need to question the idea that Trump’s America First agenda is unprecedented, that the U.S. imperium—whether under Republicans or Democrats—has not continuously violated international norms. Didn’t Barack Obama threaten to renegotiate NAFTA? Didn’t George W. Bush put Iran in the “Axis of Evil” and openly scorn France and Germany for failing to join his misadventure in Iraq? It has become too easy since Trump’s ascension to say that the United States once advanced liberal democracy and freedom. This was never the view from India or Pakistan, let alone Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The United States was and is a self-interested global hegemon; it has supported the world’s worst despots when they seemed to protect U.S. interests. The only difference is that Trump openly repudiates emollient rhetoric and does not hesitate to alienate U.S. allies.

Jacques Derrida talks about two different notions of the future. There is “the future” (le futur), the programmed, prescribed, predictable unrolling of the present so as to perpetuate what already is, to extend the way things are. This is the future in which capital relentlessly expands and empires cling on, locking in and deepening existing relations of power. The immiseration of the peripheries. The financialization of everything. The sixth mass extinction. The carbon we have already burned, suspended in the air around us, and that which is still in the ground but which we cannot avoid burning. [...]