The Politics of Parasites and Superfluous Majorities

BECKENHAUERacross these spheres has been the attempt to consolidate control through a patrimonial strategy that aims to align the interests of powerful actors with Trump, while generating greater levels of dysfunction and offloading the costs of these policies onto the majority of the population.This has been, at least thus far, met with relatively little opposition from the Democratic Party.This lack of a strong political opposition raises more fundamental, and disturbing, political questions about potential bipartisan consensus for Trump's actions, which overall aim at making dysfunctional the parts of the U.S. state that could hold oligarchs accountable.This consensus is also an implicit endorsement or general apathy toward Trump's attempt to decouple an oligarchic class from obligations to the U.S. population, which is clarified by an engagement with French philosopher Michel Serres' theorization of the parasite. 8 This oligarchic agenda is enacted and protected by decimating funding for public goods and reinforcing control over coercive parts of the state that insulate this class from future unrest and democratic accountability. 9I argue that Trump's oligarchic agenda is made intelligible as a form of parasitism.Serres defines the core of parasitism as extraction without reciprocity.One way to understand the first one hundred days of Trump's second presidency is as a form of decoupling the wealthiest from the fate of the general population, as the wealthiest increasingly embed themselves within the state and extract resources from the population.This domestic decoupling is intertwined with Trump's efforts to decouple the U.S. from China.The means by which Trump prefers to rule -as a reality TV host who has fittingly relied heavily on Fox News anchors to occupy some of the most important positions in his administration -entails a particular form of mastery of channels of communication and the production of noise, which Serres suggests is also constitutive of the parasite. 10 Critical to this contemporary political uncertainty has been the dramatic and vulgar display of elite control over all aspects of governance.This has taken the form of attacking funding for basic public goods, often through the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), 11 escalating the coercive powers of the state, and removing legal oversight. 12Both the Republican and Democratic Parties are increasingly riven by internal contradictions.As Anton Jger has recently argued, Trump has overseen a political