‘There remains an immense suspicion of political pessimism. Salvage has always stressed that our pessimism, born of analysis, is not at all coterminous with surrender – the opposite – and that it yearns to be wrong. At this moment, this fist in the face, any response other than a pessimistic sense of the growing gulf between us and emancipation would be delusional. It is precisely to fight the forces emboldened by this shift that we must start by acknowledging how strong, and how dire, they are.
The Left must remain hard not only in its ‘support for’ but its aggressive, militant solidarity with migrants, with the black activists insisting that the police be held to account, against whom an onslaught is to be expected. We must work vigorously in united fronts without blunting our politics of opposition, without succumbing to the forthcoming wave of sentimentality about Obama – the mechanisms of drone death, whistleblower-attack and trenchant state surveillance now in the hands of a bloviating monster are, of course, Obama’s mechanisms. In response to the liberals with whom we will march, who insist to us that ‘love trumps hate’, we must argue instead for more hate, to hate more, to hate harder – in the right direction. More than one commentator, and not only of the far Left or right, has discerned in this moment a slide towards a new civil war. This is only half-correct. It is one of the vanishingly few positive things one can say about Trump’s victory that it clarifies that: the war was here already.’
