PREFACE

“Mr Nemo” is a pseudonym adopted by an angry, unemployed philosopher: me.

“Trump” names a President of the United States of America, elected on 8 November 2016.

“The WTFU Party” names an alternative political party created by me on 22 November 2016, in reaction and response to Trump’s election.

This lightly-edited compilation of short essays, which I started writing the day after Trump’s election, and then posted online in regular installments on Medium, starting on 22 November 2016, running more-or-less weekly over the course of roughly a year, up to 3 November 2017, is a record of my attempt to develop, express, and refine my admittedly radical, or at the very least unconventional, ideas about politics, as an ongoing critical, philosophical narrative about the first year in The Age of Trump.

One year later, I think it’s safe to say that The WTFU Party was a failure—alas.

But, perhaps, it was also one of the promethean failures described here:

https://medium.com/indian-thoughts/on-philosophical-failures-68da13e6cddb

In any case, I most gratefully thank the Party’s 12 members and 23 fellow-travelers/sympathizers, including 7 cats and dogs — Duke, Betty, Ashi, Sweetpea, Walter Johnson, Captain, and Lukas — and one orphan baby squirrel, for their interest, infra-human or trans-species solidarity, and tolerance.

I’m re-publishing these essays here as a book, and also making them universally shareable, in the passionate hope that they’ll do somebody, somewhere, somehow, some good.

Mr Nemo, Nowhere, NA, 8 November 2017[1]

NOTE

[1] The seven-part WTFU Party platform was repeated in every post, and has also been included in the first seven essays below because they successively introduce and rationally justify each part of the platform, but otherwise it has been left out. A few of the posts were more angrily or jokily political than philosophically political, so I’ve also left those out. And one or two posts mentioned collusion between Trump/Trump’s minions and Putin/Russia, but I’ve been subsequently convinced by the journalists Glenn Greenwald, Caitlin Johnstone, and Michael Tracey that “Russiagate” is largely a case of manufactured consent organized by the contemporary power elite in order to further its own self-interests at the expense of everyone else’s well-being: so I’ve left those out too.

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