it's like we stubbed our gigantic toe. when you start noticing it, collective subjectivities are everywhere. 'we' always think stuff and feel stuff as one gigantic leviathanly mind, or we always talk like that. it's always worth easing back and thinking about what these consciousnesses are or who's using them how or how they are produced, if they are, or why we're picking out this one rather than that. i like it when it floats to the very outside, where we're all apparently feeling the same thing at the same time. an idiotic brand of punditry does this all day every day: americans are scared! we only want to know who can keep us safe. what explains the rise of donald trump? 'there's a lot of anger out there.' he's tapped into our anxieties, or maybe just the anxieties of white men. ask yourself how much that is really helping you understand something, or whether it's really true etc. it's like 'america is in love with kim kardashian,' maybe.
really american political discourse can be so pitiful. if you're a columnist or talking head, people ask you to 'explain the trump phenomenon.' really, you don't know, and you don't want to go out on a limb in any way, because you're not actually out there to advocate positions, but to get back on tv tomorrow, and if you say whatever everyone else is saying, you at least can't make a howling mistake, or anywaybyou can't be uniquely blamed for it. so what you do is produce the same sentences as everyone else, with an air of saying something deep: 'there's a lot of real anxiety out there that he's tapped into', etc.
