The AI upheaval is unique in its ability to metabolize any number of dread-inducing transformations. The university is becoming more corporate, more politically oppressive, and all but hostile to the humanities? Yes — and every student gets their own personal chatbot. The second coming of the Trump Administration has exposed the civic sclerosis of the US body politic? Time to turn the Social Security Administration over to Grok. Climate apocalypse now feels less like a distant terror than a fact of life? In three years, roughly a tenth of US energy demand will come from data centers alone.

The hardening authoritarianism of the second Trump Administration has many faces, but the most chilling is one that can hardly be seen at all.

Naturally there were lots of law enforcement types hanging around the convention — men with military fades, moisture-wicking shirts, and tattoos of the Bible and the Constitution and eagles and flags distended across their arms. But there were also a handful of women ICE applicants and a lot of men of color. The deportation officer applicant pool was, I felt, shockingly diverse — one might say it looked like America. The whole place looked and felt like America.

All the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents I saw in the atrium were white, of medium height and build, and many wore plain baseball caps. They were all men and they stuck out because they displayed an exceeding level of stillness and homogeneity in a room with a flow of people from all over the world, people who were always in motion and who mostly looked different from one another.

More and bigger detention infrastructure follows a strict logic of “if you build it, they will fill it.” Larger county jails not only enable the incarceration of more people by local police; they also offer flexible detention capacity to ICE and other federal agencies. As one recent report from the Prison Policy Initiative puts it, local jails both “obscure and facilitate” mass deportation.

The challenge posed by this political crisis is how to take the stupidity seriously without reducing it to a wholly mental or psychiatric, let alone genetic, phenomenon. Stupidity can be understood as a problem of social systems rather than individuals, as André Spicer and Mats Alvesson explore in their book The Stupidity Paradox. Stupidity, they write, can become “functional,” a feature of how organizations operate on a daily basis, obstructing ideas and intelligence despite the palpable negative consequences. Yet it’s hard to identify anything functional about Trumpian stupidity, which is less a form of organizational inertia or disarray than a slash-and-burn assault on the very things — universities, public health, market data — that help make the world intelligible.

The more experienced attendees explain that here, one’s individual experience is seen as a symptom of the group’s dynamics. If someone is physically ill, it is because the system needs to eject someone; if someone feels rejected, it is because the group needs a scapegoat to hold everyone’s feelings of shame. If you act out or say something inflammatory, it’s because you’ve been unconsciously mobilized by others. Everything means something: if you close a window, you are trying to protect the group. If you’re sleepy, it’s because the group is making you sleepy. You do not have food poisoning; you have group poisoning.

Trump was — and is — intent on creating a new future, and to gain a better sense of that vision, I needed to understand what future he was working to prevent. I asked Andil to meet that weekend, and he agreed. I would play amateur journalist and interview Andil again, this time about how he fell into the government’s crosshairs.

The truth is, I want to fucking kill him. Because, not that long ago, I was a semi-together individual with some irons of my own in the fire, living in an apartment that had finally achieved the elegantly shabby je ne sais quoi one might hope for in a quaintly garret-like Brooklyn abode. And now I’m this wild-eyed person with scalloped rat barriers around her doors who watches her space heater on a baby monitor.

I don’t care about anything else, I have them, when they wake up we can celebrate the prison break, the reunion, the successful hostage exchange, we can stop for breakfast, decide together what to do next.

We have no tradition, she said. What could we say to the dead except that we’re sorry for living? No, we confuse people too much already. How much more could they take? They hear “transsexual” and want us to prove it. They want weeping in front of mirrors. They want heartfelt confessions with parents on the couch. They will never take you seriously or consider you normal. They want hand-me-down emotions.

So I told everyone that night
At Chapel Bar, where a boy spoke
Of trying to suffocate himself
With a bag that had once held
Snacks, but the second he smelled
Sour cream and chive, he knew
He had to stay. “I thought you
Would laugh at that,” and I did.

Both the neoliberal turn and the nationalist backlash, Lomnitz argues, are parts of a single process that has given rise to a new kind of state — one characterized by “an excess of sovereignty and a deficit of administrative capacity.” It’s hard to imagine a stronger sovereign for Mexico than AMLO, but his administration failed to make the state more accountable or trustworthy.

Eco-confessionalism marshals the self-reflexivity of poetic language, its distance from everyday communication, to register commitments without reifying them, to critique the present without lapsing into fatalism about the future. Looking outward, to the desperate reality of our world, and inward, to its own lyric preconditions, this new poetry is learning how to speak, subtly and capaciously, about the biggest crisis in history.

What is discussed in classrooms, rather than conference halls, about “our alternative ecologies, our archives of resistance, our insurgent epistemologies ” is important. It provides a vocabulary, a grammar for the very students whose encampments were met with such violent resistance. And at least here in the UK, literature departments are hubs of union organizing and resistance. If it weren’t so, there wouldn’t be such a concerted effort — whether in the neoliberal garb of austerity, or in the racist cloak of “fighting woke” — to dismantle the humanities.