“Undocumented Citizens” and the new Newspeak – by Wesley Yang – Year Zero
We can therefore see here what the Successor Regime aims for and how it goes about obtaining its ends, which in turn tells us about the sociology of the movement of which it is a part: the manufacture of consensus around a range of issues through the capture of disciplinary power by adherents sharing a common set of values and goals that seeks to rule out various aspects of political action as presumptively illegitimate (border control, policing, prisons, standardized testing) by policing any debate out of them out of existence. It is a vision of a radically less disciplinary society of the street obtained through a radically more disciplinary society of the seminar room, workplace, board room, and bedroom — an ongoing distributed process of moral revolution without central direction but converging relentlessly around the same handful of goals a politics of persuasion without persuasion, abjuring persuasion for coercion.
The process evades electoral politics entirely, simply erupting occasionally in enactments and pronouncements that appear to us in the guise of fait d’accompli, as the newspeak moves seamlessly from student life offices to the language of offices of the US federal government. On August 12, the Twitter account of the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Texas tweeted out a press release announcing that “Young soldiers admit to transporting undocumented citizens.”
Horribly written but the author makes a powerful point. “– a politics of persuasion without persuasion, abjuring persuasion for coercion.”