Absolute Zero
A numbing, paralyzing chill descends upon Washington with the return of Donald Trump to the White House.
This Monday morning around the time Joe Biden was greeting Donald Trump’s arrival at the White House with a hearty “Welcome home!” I was scrambling around in single-digit temperatures trying to install a radiant heater in my chicken coop. Under normal conditions, it is not advisable to electrically warm a chicken coop, as it prevents the birds from developing dense plumage they need to survive in case the artificial heat source fails. But these were not normal conditions. Temperatures were forecasted to bottom out at -12 degrees Fahrenheit. Without a supplemental heat source, the risk of death and suffering to the chickens was significant.
“There’s no such thing as cold, just an absence of heat…an absence of energy.” The thought popped into my head as I threaded the heater’s cord through a gap in the coop’s wiring. Trying to maintain livable conditions and preserve the normal order of things in the coop, I remembered the Second Law of Thermodynamics: entropy, a measure of disorder, increases over time in a closed system. It required my proactive effort of bringing in an external energy source to ensure that the coop, a closed system of backyard chicken care, did not descend into the deathly chill of entropy.
As the LED screen of the heater lit up and heat radiated from the panel, I realized I had completed my small-scale farming duties in time to watch the inauguration of our 47th and former 45th President, Donald Trump. With temperatures in DC in the teens the inauguration had been moved indoors. While it was surely warmer than my chicken coop in Pittsburgh or the outside steps of the Capitol, there still appeared to be a similar deathly chill descending upon the Rotunda. Far from a dynamic dictator, the Donald Trump who rose to deliver his inauguration speech looked like death barely warmed over. And while the speech was filled with trademark Trump hyperbole and partisan venom it was delivered at a languid pace that felt like I was watching a video feed on 0.75x speed, the kind of “low energy” performance that the old Trump would have used as fodder to blast adversaries like Jeb Bush. Even the content of Trump’s speech felt like poorly reheated leftovers from his campaign trail rants, the inside of the dish still frozen and inedible. Despite being denounced by Trump as part of a “radical and corrupt establishment,” Joe Biden looked on with his aged face frozen like a death mask while by his side Kamala Harris maintained an ice queen scowl. Both the ascendent MAGA regime and the Democratic opposition seemed devoid of dynamic energy. It was as though the Soul of the Nation had been sucked into a polar vortex.
What transpired Monday within the Capitol Rotunda felt less like a new administration exploding with fascist passion than a tired Republic descending toward maximum entropy, a frigid state prefiguring the heat death our universe will inevitably face once all energy unleashed by the Big Bang has faded into oblivion. That’s not to say that January 20th, 2025 didn’t have shocking outbursts of fascist enthusiasm. Elon Musk rallied an inauguration party crowd with hand gestures that any sane human being with a basic education would immediately recognize as a Sieg Heil Nazi salute. Later that evening Trump would pardon over 1,500 participants in the January 6th insurrection, flinging open the jailer’s gates to release criminals convicted of assaulting law enforcement officers, disrupting Congress, and defacing the Capitol building. You might think alarm bells would be ringing at full volume after the world’s richest man does a spot-on Heinrich Himmler impersonation or the president flaunts the law to free throngs of ultra-loyalists capable of forming the nucleus of a MAGA Schutzstaffel. Unfortunately, the response from the legacy media, the supposed Democratic opposition, and the remnants of civil society was less heated resistance and more sangfroid numbness. Major news publications and even the Anti-Defamation League accepted the excuse that Musk’s behavior was merely the overexcited gestures of a neurodivergent man, as though autistic stimming frequently involves repeated straight-arm salutes with militaristic precision. News stories about the insurrectionist pardons featured photos of prisoners embracing loved ones and accounts of popping champagne in joyful reunions, feeling more like human interest pieces than fiery condemnations of a recklessly divisive act drawing the criticism of the Fraternal Order of Police. Even Democratic Senator John Fetterman was photographed giving a thumbs up next to Adam Christian Johnson, a notorious insurrectionist known for carrying Nancy Pelosi’s lectern around the Capitol building on January 6th. Fetterman’s team denies he had any knowledge of Johnson’s identity when the picture was taken. That may be so, but the fact that Fetterman traveled to Mar-A-Lago earlier this month to bend the knee to Trump suggests that Democrats will not bring the heat of criticism to the second Trump administration like they brought to the first. The fires of dissent in 2025 are barely flickering, as a cold, paralyzing hopelessness spreads across the land.
This entropic decline of American democracy is not an accident of history or the inevitable result of the laws of thermodynamics. The entropy afflicting our Republic is the culmination of a half-century-long endeavor on the part of our nation’s corporate elites, made possible by their Republican co-conspirators and their Democratic enablers. Since the early 1970s, with the dissemination of the Powell Memorandum and the formation of “nonprofit” propaganda mills like the Heritage Foundation, business elites have poured billions of dollars into extinguishing the American people’s faith in their democratically elected government. They have hijacked the Supreme Court through the maneuverings of groups like the Federalist Society and have thrown sand of disorder into the gears of our federal government with anti-regulatory litigation. They have demonized the politician while glorifying the businessman, paving the way for a much more demonic character, the billionaire businessman autocrat. They have demonized an unjustifiable caricature of socialism and glorified an unachievable idealization of capitalism, spawning an entirely different economic system far worse than both, Collusionism. With billionaire Trump’s ascension applauded by the likes of Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Tim Cook, Monday’s spectacle within the Capitol Rotunda was not so much an inauguration but a Collusionist coronation. It calls to mind Justice Brandeis’ ageless quote, “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both.” By celebrating his inauguration in the presence of tech oligarchs rather than firefighters, steel workers, and nurses, Trump’s inauguration was a declaration of total class war by the oligarchy against the American people. The only question now is whether the people can rekindle the energy to fight back and whether the Democratic Party will fight for or against us.
After 48 hours, the temperatures in Western Pennsylvania have finally risen into the positive double digits. I am happy to say my chickens lived. A grizzled old farmer might sneer at such pampering, claiming that the chickens would have lived anyway, and if not that would have just been nature running its course. Over the next four years, more and more Americans may come to regard working to save our democracy as almost as hopelessly tenderhearted as trying to save three chickens from a polar vortex. Such cynicism is the friend of entropy - it prevents us from fighting back against the forces of disorder and cold-heartedness. To fight the entropy swallowing our democracy we need to bring positive energy and keep the fires of hope burning in our hearts. Still, entropy can only be reversed by focused energy that creates order, rather than the sound and the fury of the largely symbolic and online resistance that opposed the first Trump presidency. All the hashtag activism, clenched fist protest march selfies, podcast recommendations, woke reading groups and endless streaming of social justice content did little more than add billions to the net worth of the tech oligarchs who ultimately betrayed us. To defeat the entropic wasting disease that is Collusionism we must fight for a new order, a new structure of society that drains the bulging tumors of concentrated wealth imperiling not just our democracy but life itself. We need concrete goals like universal healthcare, an aggressive wealth tax, and a universal job guarantee, policies that can help us easily differentiate the politicians who fight for the people from those who fight for the oligarchy.
But most importantly we cannot lose faith in our ability to work collectively to create a more compassionate world. During her Tuesday sermon at Washington’s National Cathedral, Episcopal bishop Mariann Budde implored a visibly agitated Trump, “In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now.” In this dark winter of disorder, Bishop Budde’s brave message of warmth and compassion calls to mind the words of an old hymn, “Now the green blade riseth, from the buried grain, Wheat that in dark earth many days has lain; Love lives again, that with the dead has been: Love is come again like wheat that springeth green.” Do not let these cold and cynical times extinguish the fires of love and justice in your heart. Do not let the thick layers of snow and ice hide the fact that if we struggle to survive we will once again enjoy the beauty and warmth of spring.
Damn, chicken coops make for surprisingly good metaphors! Terrific piece, and easily my favorite read in what's already been a hellish week.