During the 2016 election, there began to spread a widespread misconception about what it meant to legitimize accelerationism, and who an accelerationist was and what they wanted. "Burning it all down" would be too pat a narrative for anyone who wanted to call pessimism unwarranted or defeatist.
Before 2016, the ability to get even liberals to take seriously the threat of neo-Nazis, right-wing fascist militias, and even the concept of a white nationalist movement hellbent on a white ethnostate was, at best, difficult, and typically, was even more painful than getting a conservative to admit a view might be bigoted (because, at best, they probably don't care). In the run-up to the election, it was derided as a threat because everyone thought it was a slam dunk election, and afterwards, suddenly, without admitting these were real threats, they became legitimize as a rhetorical devices as shorthand for the apparently singular evil of Donald Trump.
So, as a result, continuing to speak to this threat (for example, a recent mass shooter was radicalized by a militia notorious in South Florida since the early 90's for embodying this threat) was regarded as overly cynical or conspiratorial, rather than this idea that the state was literally subsidizing institutional Nazism (at best, it was cosigning the behavior as politically useful, just like the state does whenever politically expedient, and this is not partisan behavior) but that an apparently anti-democratic "fascist" regime would, somehow, also be responsive to an apparently free election (because this belief system also requires believing in an actual conspiracy, based on almost no facts, about election interference)– this is just the inverse behavior of the co-opting of fascist social movements for political currency. The end goal, of course, is simply to perpetuate neoliberal socioeconomic political culture without really moving the needle in terms of, either, combating or emboldening fascists.
So, here's where the accelerationist smear comes into play: At the beginning of this narrative, there was a lot of smearing of leftists who liberals insincerely hoped to advance as covert Trump voters, with a bogus accusation of having done so in order to begin the collapse of the democratic order (never mind that the choices, in both 2016 and 2020, were between overt corporatists, the only difference being that the corporate interest dictating policy would either be self-interested or cartel-interested). This, of course, has the effect of removing an obvious class (and intersections of it) analysis from mainstream political discourse, because of course, for example, an ethnic minority being brutalized by the state, and are also experiencing an unprecedent bipartisan gaslighting about how this is actually good and necessary for the orderly function of society, might be amenable to saying this society can't be saved and call itself just.
The idea that this is all just about "burning it down" seeks to equate something like a protest against police brutality to a riot like we saw earlier this year at the Capitol; that it's all unruly, senseless violence when the former is a response to overtly violent and unnecessary state violence and the latter was about, well, nothing. The point is to make it seem feckless, not mature and refined like the reformist nature of almost all liberal strategy, which typically amounts to negotiating yourself down, before talking to a single opponent who will, of course, require more compromises, and this is to say that in acting on behalf of the latter/opposing tendency in the name of the former, liberals (in this case) are contributing to the bloat that prolongs the inevitable when we're talking about the reality that capitalism, and the late-capitalist imperialist state, has already won– collapse.
I recently saw an editor of a mainstream publication essentially admit to feeling that collapse is the only way out from under this condition; This is good that we're at a phase of the long-running theory from someone in extremely mainstream media. Accelerationism can go one of two ways: the defeatism that breeds fascism (and requires the aforementioned bloat to prolong the suffering), or the opportunism that breeds communism, as Marx might argue is an inevitability but only opportunistically organizing can make it a liberation outcome rather than hegemonic-driven evil by the ruling class that manages to survive. Only the latter respects the boundaries natural world.
I won't make an impassioned case for accelerationism, because it's not really about that, it's about the fact that we are dealing with the conditions of capitalist collapse as Marx observed, and correctly predicted, over and over again– this is one tendency that explains how the modern work might hasten it, and has nothing to do with an abstraction like a partisan election to usher it in; a similar absurdity is the notion I mention earlier, that to defeat a fascist, you simply vote him out. The big barrier, as not only (left-)accelerationists see it, is that this obvious inevitably is, frankly, demoralizing– it's demoralizing to realize you're dying for a lie, and the lie isn't even a good one, that if you work hard in this society you'll succeed, but because of liberal and conservative removal of class as a consideration entirely, you are gas-lit over and over about where the starting line truly was, or even if you were ever intended to find the finish line.
I don't fault people for being defeatist; it's the natural response to watching what's unfolding, and in any other time would've resulted in revolution 30 years ago. But, we can still do it, but it does require collapse, acceleration (either coerced, or because the collapse has begun to avalanche) to happen. There's no reform that can help.
Why do I mention all of this? Well, it starts with where the game-show hostificiation of our country really begins; queuing up the postmodernist emulation of charisma in the Trump era with the decadent abuses of legalism and rhetoric and charm of the Clinton era. Liberals excused objectively criminal conduct on the basis of legal technicality for political reasons, because there were, objectively, political motivations for pursuing prosecution, but crime had occurred, and for just as many legitimate legal reasons, prosecution was being pursued, and that took a backseat to the side show, and so, it first occurs as tragedy, our system’s judiciary becoming pro forma and pointless, and then again as farce, with Trump plausibly to return to the presidency despite in all likelihood doing so facing the possibility of a criminal conviction as direct fallout from those decisions made by elites on both sides, sharing a class prerogative, at the expense of the public who, for the above accelerationist reasons, were fed the news as infotainment.
If this seems cynical, perhaps it is, but it’s also literally, materially true, and that’s the entire point of Contempt, Ken Starr’s memoir of the Clinton Impeachment. Starr decided not to speak about his role in these events for a long time, breaking his silence in 2018 in, frankly, a very convincing manner, with no particular agenda; you could argue he just wanted to say “I told you so”, which, frankly, he did, but what does he gain from that? He lost in every way that ever matters— David Souter got his Supreme Court seat, his two proteges, John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh, surpassed him professionally as well and disgraced whatever possible legacy he could have left on the legal profession as a notable mentor. Even the Starr Report is tainted by the fact that the Clinton Administration bullied main Justice into acting as his defense during the proceedings after cooperating prior to the merging of the Paula Jones suit into the Whitewater investigation at the core of Starr’s investigation, lending (false) credence to the insistence that this was an ideological hit job despite every word of it being, in Clinton’s own words, literally what happened, and that he did, indeed, lie about it. That he was guilty. So what did Starr actually do wrong? I’m not arguing that he’s the protagonist, but that he’s a target is a symptom of what the culture of mainstream political cultural consumption became; we, the public, view these events as disconnected from material reality, as metaphysical narrative.
Chuck Klosterman in I Wear the Black Hat suggests the villain is the one who “knows the most but cares the least”, and in this case, and he struggles to grasp who the villain really is in this narrative, because everyone has loaded vested interests, and varying amounts of siloed knowledge, and he draws a different conclusion about these proceedings than I do, but his premise is sound about villainy, and I think this is a good way to approach processing who is the driver of the events in this instance that shaped the resulting political landscape. Clinton, demonstrably, influenced so many things as a result, up to and including how Al Gore conducted his campaign, almost trying to be an anti-Clinton, despite Clinton leaving office more popular than ever; a move that actually cost his votes, surely more than Nader “stole” from him (lol) or were stolen (yes) by the stalled recount or miscast for Buchanan. See where I’m going with this? It triggers many such instances where we suspend material reality to start negotiating what we are going to agree upon what constitutes materially real.
This condition snowballs. Neoliberalism becomes the mainstream Democratic opposition to a furthering corporatist Republican mainstream, the gap between them closes, nominally apart on social issues, elections hinge on these social issues, the former uses them as a cudgel, refusing to act to protect them allowing the situation to become more dire to justify voting for them despite the ideological distance closing, the latter attack more aggressively, rinse, repeat, and so on. The end result being very much like where we are now, where the institutions are entirely ceremonial, all choice is curated, no outcome represents a threat to a superstructure that can tolerate either outcome. All of this is metaphysical fog to obscure, again, material reality; rights were never gained through voting, but by organizers who threatened legitimacy crisis, and courts granted them, and legislatures were then tasked with codifying them, which then they failed to do, so this metaphysical fog only serves that interest of obstruction, of serving the shared prerogative of the superstructure, at the expense of people, fueling the acceleration. And what does this have to do with Clinton? Well, it starts with that pivot: a synthesis of corporatist economics and a commitment to neutralizing extra-electoral activism, which is what allows runaway campaign finance to drive the course of society to exactly where we are right now.
Track the degradation from 1980 to 2012, and then 2012 to the present, and compare these periods to any other time in history to understand the volume of sheer social and economic exploitation and decay and almost idealization of decision paralysis under conditions unprecedented in human history; social theory like the J-curve of rising expectations, for example, could not have foreseen a tolerance toward this kind of society’s negligence toward the public, and as we learn from history, the larger the disparity, the larger the response must be in correction.