This is not an essay about Trump

This essay rejects efforts to understand the political field in the US as a war between two easily identified camps. It begins to think about the rise of the reactionary right (and Trump's place in it) by considering some of the stakes in play and strategies at work. Drawing on Gramsci's notion of organic crises, it considers how such crises are being constructed, deployed and contested. It argues for the need to understand the ways in which the reactionary right has 'weaponised' and affectively managed the chaos of the overwhelming heterogeneity of the fields of political struggles.