Moved to tears...
By Henry Giroux
Donald Trump’s re-election marks not just a political turning point but the ascendance of a corpse-like order, a nation stiffening under the weight of its own decay. His second coming is less a victory than a danse macabre, a spectral procession of hollow men in red ties and stiff gaits—zombies with ice in their veins.
Watch him move: jerky, lifeless, as if his body resents rhythm itself. A wooden plank with a painted sneer, twitching to the anthem of reaction, soulless and mean. No body on fire, no slow bend toward desire, no trace of the supple grace that lives in a world still capable of love. Instead, the stage is set for the new order of the manosphere—puffed-up bodies, drunk on steroids and grievance, exuding the acrid scent of sweat and power.
This is the culture that Trumpism has wrought: stripped of tenderness, of improvisation, of joy. Gone is the world I knew as a working-class kid, where music spilled into the streets, where voices—aching, defiant, untamed—set bodies in motion. Etta James wailing, Billie Holiday lingering on the edge of heartbreak, Nina Simone playing the piano like she was conjuring a storm. Little Anthony and the Imperials harmonizing into the night. This was a world of movement, of bodies ignited by something more than rage—by love, longing, the exquisite pain of feeling too much.
But in the America of Trump 2025, the only bodies that matter are those that march in unison, rigid and obedient. His regime, unbound by law or morality, has reconfigured the machinery of the state into an instrument of vengeance. The January 6th insurrectionists walk free, hailed as patriots. Federal agencies are gutted, purged of dissent. Civil rights protections are erased with the stroke of a pen. Universities, once imperfect sanctuaries of critical thought, are being remade into white Christian indoctrination centers. And in an act of breathtaking cruelty, thousands of immigrants await detention in Guantánamo Bay, that purgatorial space of empire where justice goes to die.
This is not simply the return of authoritarianism; it is its evolution—leaner, more technologically adept, more deeply enmeshed in the fabric of corporate and digital power. Trump does not rule alone. He is merely the frontman for an oligarchy that has abandoned even the pretense of democracy. The billionaire class—those slick architects of social media monopolies, the digital overlords of surveillance capitalism—have found their perfect vehicle in his shamelessness. Unfettered capitalism has reached its final stage, where wealth no longer hides its contempt for the masses but wears it like a badge.
Former President Biden, in his farewell speech, warned of the creeping shadow of oligarchy, yet he dared not name the truth: that his own party, with its bloodless embrace of neoliberalism, helped forge the conditions for Trump’s resurrection.
This is not simply the triumph of reactionary forces but the consequence of a culture that has surrendered to its own worst instincts—one that has forsaken solidarity for spectacle, justice for cruelty, hope for managed decline.
And so we are left with this: staggering inequality, a militarized state, the slow and methodical unmaking of democracy. The new oligarchs scorn the very notion of the public good. They mock reason, erase history, and demand that government sever itself from any lingering obligation to care. They speak the language of the market, where everything—including life itself—is merely another commodity to be traded, exploited, discarded.
But I remember another rhythm, another cadence, one that refuses to die. I think of Etta James, her voice raw and thunderous, shattering the quiet. I think of bodies in motion, defiant and free. There is something in that memory, something still smoldering in the ashes of this broken democracy. Maybe, just maybe, there is still a fire that cannot be extinguished. Listen and dream:
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