The Counterrevolution

by Bernard E. Harcourt

  Trump’s presidential campaign was unique in this sense and his success was directly related to his command of reality TV—his commanding performances on The Apprentice and Celebrity Apprentice, and other entertainment venues. Trump became such a social-media phenomenon that even when he did not participate in one of the Republican primary debates, that very night he dominated the other candidates in terms of searches on the Internet and social-media postings.11

  This is not to suggest that this new digital entrancement is mere spectacle or simply innocuous. Much of it is based on despicable forms of hatred. Trump’s comments about not letting any Muslims into the country—and his subsequent executive orders prohibiting entry from particular Muslim-majority countries—as well as his derogatory remarks about Mexican immigrants (suggesting that they are rapists and murderers) and women all play on racial and gender prejudice, religious bias, and ethnic hatred. And similarly, a lot of the attention on the Internet is “gawker” interest: the curiosity of the freak show, of the extreme position. In February 2016, Trump was caught unwittingly retweeting a quote from Benito Mussolini—it was a ruse set up by the website Gawker intended to trap Trump. Trump himself, however, did not miss a beat, and when asked by a news network whether he wanted to be associated with Mussolini, Trump responded: “No, I want to be associated with interesting quotes.”12 According to the report, Trump then added that “he does ‘interesting things’ on his social-media accounts, which have racked up ‘almost fourteen million’ followers combined, and, ‘Hey, it got your attention, didn’t it?’”

  “It got your attention”: that is the modus operandi of a social media, and it reflects how citizens consume politics today. Van Jones at CNN captured this phenomenon most succinctly in these words: “The Trump phenomenon flabbergasts pundits like me. We thought the billionaire was leaving the world of Entertainment, climbing over a wall and joining us in the sober domain of Politics. But in fact, the opposite happened. ‘Trump, The Entertainer’ stayed exactly where he was. Instead, he pulled the political establishment over the wall and into HIS domain. The political class is now lost in the world of reality television and social media.”13 And not only that. It was also lost—or captured—by people who were earnestly moved by racial or other forms of hatred, as well as people who enjoyed being shocked by other people’s hatred or radicalism.

  This new mode of existence and digital consumption pleases and distracts the majority of Americans. The old-fashioned TV has now been enhanced and augmented, displaced by social media on digital devices of all sorts and sizes—from the Apple Watch and tablet, through the MacBook Air and Mac Pro, to the giant screen TV and even the Jumbotron. And all of it serves to pacify the masses and ensure that they do not have the time or attention span to question the domestication of the counterinsurgency.

  And, then, it all feeds back into total information awareness. Hand in hand, government agencies, social media, Silicon Valley, and large retailers and corporations have created a mesmerizing new digital age that simultaneously makes us expose ourselves and everything we do to government surveillance and that serves to distract and entertain us. All kinds of social media and reality TV consume and divert our attention, making us give our data away for free. A profusion of addictive digital platforms—from Gmail, Facebook, and Twitter, to YouTube and Netflix, Amazon Prime, Instagram, and Snapchat, and now Pokémon GO—distract us into exposing all our most private information, in order to feed the new algorithms of commerce and intelligence services: to profile us for both watch lists and commercial advertising.

  To understand how the American population is being pacified in this new digital age, it is important to analyze more closely how the information and data shape us so deeply and unconsciously. The fact is, whether it is the attention-grabbing brashness of Donald Trump or the pleasure of Pokémon GO, these new forms of entertainment mold our thoughts and emotions. They shape our deeper selves in profound ways—ways that render us entranced, gullible, and submissive. These new obsessions blunt our criticality.

  A good illustration of how these new digital distractions shape us, almost surreptitiously, was the Internet phenomenon “Damn, Daniel!” You may already have forgotten about it—that is the singularity of these fleeting viral episodes. They consume all our attention and then vanish and are forgotten, under the spell of the next one. “Damn, Daniel!” exploded on the scene in February 2016 and rapidly went viral. The video, made on an iPhone using Snapchat, was that of a young man, Daniel Lara (age fourteen), caught on camera on successive days, showing off his stylish shoes. It had an overlaid voice, each day and each time, saying, “Damn, Daniel!” with a swagger. On particular snippets, when Daniel was wearing particular shoes—white slip-on Vans—the voiceover said “Damn, Daniel! Back at it again with those white Vans!”

  The short video, only thirty seconds long, was made public on February 15, 2016, and went viral in a matter of days. It had over forty-five million views by the time the two boys—Daniel Lara and Joshua Holtz (age fifteen)—were invited on The Ellen Degeneres Show on February 24, 2016.14 The boys became overnight celebrities because of the supposed catchiness of the meme “Damn, Daniel!” (You can still watch the video.15) Within days, songs and remixes were being written and produced using the meme. Rappers Little, Teej, and LeBlanc created a track using the meme, raising issues of race and white privilege.16 Another artist, Suhmeduh, made a more popular techno remix as well.17 Celebrities as far and wide as Justin Bieber, Kanye West, and Kim Kardashian began sporting white Vans, riffing off the meme.18 On February 25, 2016, the New York Times—yes, the Times began writing about it—referred to the video as “the latest Internet sensation,” and reported that “Daniel said that he can’t even go to the mall or a swim meet without being asked for photos with his fans or getting marriage proposals.”19

  Only twelve days after the video had been released, on February 27, 2016, it was hard to keep up with all of the fallout from the meme—positive (Ellen gave Daniel a lifetime supply of Vans) and negative (Joshua Holtz, for instance, got swatted).20 Although easily dismissed as just “entertaining nonsense”—that’s how the New York Times starts its article about the Internet phenomenon, describing it as “a meme ris[ing] up from the wondrous bog of entertaining nonsense that is the Internet”—a lot was going on with the “Damn, Daniel!” meme.

  For instance, the video itself valorized consumption. In the video, Daniel sported a different pair of new shoes practically every day, with the climax being his white Vans. It’s unclear whether the shoe company, Vans, was in on the phenomenon, according to the Times; but they certainly benefited commercially. They could not have produced a more effective commercial. The whole phenomenon centered on consumption and the commercialization of those white Vans, masquerading under the surface of a popular joke.

  There was also a clear racial dimension to the meme. It was filmed by white boys at a white high school in Riverside, California, and had all the trappings of white privilege: sunny, monied, fashionable, blond-haired white boys. The rappers Little, Teej & LeBlanc made the racial dimensions clear in their take, suggesting that black kids might not so easily get away with the same things, and they rapped about the racial-sexual innuendos surrounding the phenomenon. “Back at it again with the white Vans. Back at it again with the black Vans […] Black canvas with the black stiches and the white slit.” The white vans symbolized, for these rappers, white privilege. “Vans on, they are Mr. Clean.”21

  But notice that all of these racial and consumerist political dimensions were buried in the entertainment, hidden, though at the same time internalized by us all through a process of addictive web surfing, clicking, and downloading. As of February 22, 2016, seven days in, the video had 260,000 retweets and 330,000 “likes” on Twitter. The official YouTube version had almost 1.5 million views by February 27, 2016, with 13,617 “likes.” The meme—with all its hidden messaging and politics—surreptitiously shaped viewers through a process that included hundreds of th
ousands of “likes” and tens of millions of “shares,” “follows,” and “clicks.” It spread contagiously and simultaneously turned into a mode of existence. A style of life. The pool. The white Vans. The swim team. The girls.

  And what is not in the picture? The political economy surrounding how those white Vans were produced and made their way to the poolside at Riverside High School, or the differential treatment that young black teenagers received at their high school. Or the forms of wealth inequality and residential segregation that produced all-white public high schools. Or the contrast to the daily lived experience in an inner-city school. All of the politics were elided behind the pleasure and catchiness of the meme.

  This third aspect of counterinsurgency’s domestication is perhaps the most important, because it targets the most prized military and political objective: the general masses. And today, in the expository society, the new algorithms and digital-advertising methods have propelled the manipulation and propaganda to new heights. We are being encouraged by government and enticed by multination corporations and social media to expose and express ourselves as much as possible, leaving digital traces that permit both government and corporations to profile us and then try to shape us accordingly. To make model citizens out of us all—which means docile, entranced consumers. The governing paradigm here is to frenetically encourage digital activity—which in one sense is the opposite of docility—in order to then channel that activity in the right direction: consumption, political passivity, and avoiding the radical extremes.

  What we are witnessing is a new form of digital entrancement that shapes us as subjects, blunts our criticality, distracts us, and pacifies us. We spend so much time on our phones and devices, we barely have any time left for school or work, let alone political activism. In the end, the proper way to think about this all is not through the lens of docility, but through the framework of entrancement. It is crucial to understand this in the proper way, because breaking this very entrancement is key to seeing how counterinsurgency governance operates more broadly. Also, because the focus on docility—along an older register of discipline—is likely to lead us into an outdated focus on top-down propaganda. We need to think of domesticated counterinsurgency as not simply something done to us, but something in which we are also choosing to participate—and could choose not to.

  We could have foreseen the domestication of counterinsurgency. The French officers who developed modern warfare in the 1950s and 1960s, in fact, realized quickly that the principles and doctrines could have wider application than just the colonial conflict. Roger Trinquier identified, early on, the domestic implications of insurgent warfare. “Tried out in Indochina and brought to perfection in Algeria, [the guerre révolutionnaire] can lead to any boldness, even a direct attack on metropolitan France,” Trinquier warned. He even suggested that the French Communist Party might facilitate domestic terrorism, leading to the possibility that a “few organized and well-trained men of action will carry out a reign of terror in the big cities” of France. The countryside and the “hilly regions such as the Massif Central, the Alps, or Brittany” would be even more susceptible to insurgency. And “with terrorism in the cities and guerrillas in the countryside, the war will have begun,” Trinquier warned his French compatriots. “This is the simple mechanism, now well known, which can at any instant be unleashed against us.”22 Modern warfare, it seemed, could flow seamlessly from the colonies to the homeland—and thus counterinsurgency needed to as well.

  The historian Peter Paret also anticipated the domestication of the counterinsurgency paradigm. In 1964, he admonished his readers “not to ignore the theses of guerre révolutionnaire, nor their implications in fields other than the purely military”—a clear reference to the political and the domestic. In fact, in the very next sentence, Paret referred to the fact that the new strategies had impacts “across military and political France.”23

  At about the same time Paret was writing on counterinsurgency, Michel Foucault advanced the idea in his 1971–1972 lectures, “Penal Theories and Institutions,” that domestic law enforcement and, more generally, relations of power in civil society could be mapped on the model of civil war. Taking the historical example of the brutal repression of the 1639 peasant uprisings in Normandy by Cardinal Richelieu and his appointed agent, the Chancelier Séguier, Foucault demonstrated how there emerged at that time a repressive model of power, or what he called a repressive judicial state apparatus. Neither purely military, nor purely fiscal—as had been the state apparatuses of the Middle Ages—the repressive strategies of Richelieu and Séguier gave way to a new law-enforcement mechanism that combined the military and the civil. This repressive judicial state apparatus appropriated the military right to give orders and the civilian right to mete out punishments. And it infringed all boundaries between military and civilian, placing itself above both simultaneously.

  That new repressive form of governing, Foucault suggested, had to be understood through the lens of the domestication and extension of civil war. Foucault’s embrace of a war matrix was influenced by his engagements with the Maoist movement, the Gauche prolétarienne. In dialogue with Maoist insurgency theory, Foucault would invert Clausewitz’s famous dictum. It is not so much that war is the continuation of politics by other means, but that politics is the continuation of war by other means. At practically the same time, Peter Paret argued, “A full understanding of Clausewitz’ famous dictum on the interaction of war and politics is the key to successful modern guerrilla operations. The guerrillas’ motive for fighting is at least partly political—or, to put it differently, ideological.”24

  The domestication of the counterinsurgency is the marriage of warfare and politics. That union is what we now face in the United States. A few months after he proclaimed a national emergency in the wake of 9/11, President George W. Bush declared that “the war against terrorism ushers in a new paradigm.”25 At the time, the new paradigm was framed in military terms. It has, however, far exceeded the laws of war. Over time, it has matured into a full-blown paradigm of governing.

  PART IV

  FROM COUNTERINSURGENCY TO THE COUNTERREVOLUTION

  11

  THE COUNTERREVOLUTION IS BORN

  EVER SINCE THE EARLY DAYS OF MODERN WARFARE IN THE 1960s, there were instances of the domestic use of counterinsurgency strategies on American soil. But in the years since 9/11, counterinsurgency has reached a crescendo in terms of its systematic and pervasive deployment at home. The paradigm was refined and systematized, and has now reached a new stage: the complete and systematic domestication of counterinsurgency against a home population where there is no real insurgency or active minority. This new stage is what I call “The Counterrevolution.”

  The Counterrevolution is a new paradigm of governing our own citizens at home, modeled on colonial counterinsurgency warfare, despite the absence of any domestic uprising. It is aimed not against a rebel minority—since none really exists in the United States—but instead it creates the illusion of an active minority which it can then deploy to target particular groups and communities, and govern the entire American population on the basis of a counterinsurgency warfare model. It operates through the three main strategies at the heart of modern warfare, which, as applied to the American people, can be recapitulated as follows:

  1. Total information awareness of the entire American population…: An elite group in the United States collects, monitors, and data-mines all our personal communications and information. These self-appointed leaders—high-ranking officials at the White House and Pentagon; heads of intelligence agencies and of police departments; members of the national security apparatus and of congressional intelligence committees; high-level CEOs at social media, private security, and tech companies like Google, Microsoft, or Facebook—could be called the “counterrevolutionary minority.” Assuming the role of guardians, they put in place, through programs such as PRISM and UPSTREAM, Section 215 and mosque surveillance, social media and data collect
ion, a system of total information awareness of the entire American population. They have acquired the ability to know everything about everyone and every device by gathering and analyzing all foreign and domestic digital traces.

  2. … in order to extract an active minority at home…: In addition to targeting suspected enemies in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, and elsewhere abroad, this self-appointed counterrevolutionary minority tries to identify and target an active minority in the United States. In the process, it fabricates out of whole cloth an amorphous, ill-defined active minority, whose boundaries shift depending on the perceived threat, but that generally includes American Muslims and Mexicans, police protesters, African American and Latino social activists, and other communities predominantly of color. These supposed internal enemies are then targeted for containment and possible elimination by the most efficient means possible: hypermilitarized policing, surveillance of mosques and Muslim communities, infiltration of protests and student groups, arrests and preventive custody, solitary confinement, juvenile detention, imprisonment, and deportation.

  3. … and win the hearts and minds of Americans: Meanwhile, the counterrevolutionary minority works to pacify and assuage the general population in order to ensure that the vast majority of Americans remain just that: ordinary consuming Americans. They encourage and promote a rich new digital environment filled with YouTube, Netflix, Amazon Prime, tweets, Facebook posts, instagrams, snapchats, and reality TV that consume attention while digitally gathering personal data—and at times, pushing enhanced content. They direct digital propaganda to susceptible users. And they shock and awe the masses with their willingness to torture suspected terrorists or kill their own citizens abroad. In the end, entertaining, distracting, entrancing, and assuaging the general population is the key to success—our new form of bread and circus.