Trump’s “Shock And Awe” Tactics: Liberal Moralizing And The Need For Radical Change

Photograph Source: The Trump White House – Public Domain

In the wake of Donald Trump’s first week as President, the Democrats opposing him are reported to be stunned, paralyzed, and intimidated. According to Peter Baker of the New York Times (Jan. 26, 2025), they have been shocked and rendered passive by “norm-shattering, democracy-defying assertions of personal power that defy the courts, the Congress, and the ethical lines that constrained past presidents.”

Well . . . yes and no. Yes, many of Trump’s executive orders stretch or overturn existing political norms. Yes, they are meant to augment his power. They are certainly impulsive, vindictive, and cruel. But no, these activities do not “defy democracy.”  They are what often happens when a strongly led political movement attempts to alter the way an existing system operates.

Establishment liberals like Baker portray the President as a megalomaniac narcissist who wants to be King. Even though there is truth in this depiction, it oversimplifies a far more complex reality. Focusing exclusively on Trump’s personal failings distracts attention from the systemic sources of his power and the need to change that system.

Consider Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose New Deal changed or overthrew a host of established norms, including limited federal power over the economy, state supremacy in matters of labor relations, health, and welfare, weak executive agencies with little discretion, presidential deference to Congress and the courts, the sanctity of individual labor contracts, and more. His opponents called him a norm-breaker and an authoritarian, and comparing his actions with those of earlier presidents, they had a point. But they missed a more important point: significant changes in an existing system almost always involve altering old norms and augmenting the power of new leaders. Although called an authoritarian and a socialist, F.D.R. redefined democracy rather than ending it and (for better and for worse) saved American capitalism.

What about Trump?  Obviously, the greedy, impulsive, narrow-minded president is no Roosevelt.  Peter Baker accuses him of wanting to increase his personal power, and he certainly does. But this characterization ignores the fact that every “imperial” president from F.D.R. to Joe Biden has increased the Chief Executive’s discretionary power, augmenting an authority that is simultaneously personal and official  If you don’t understand that the CEO of an empire is an emperor, you will attribute his actions purely to power-lust. But for the most part, the man who currently occupies the White House is simply doing nakedly what previous presidents have done with more protective coverage.  Moralizing about his personal failings does nothing to close any of America’s 700 foreign military bases or to reduce the super-profits of the military-industrial fat cats.  It is system-analysis and system-change that we need, not liberal posturing.

System-change and mass movements

Anti-Trumpers need to learn to think less in terms of the President’s cartoon villainy and more in terms of broken systems and the mass movements that challenge them. The American system, I’m sorry to say, IS broken and has been for some time. Its failure to satisfy working people’s expectations for a better and happier life is what kept millions of them from voting Democratic in 2024. The Trump administration’s principal vice is not that it seeks systemic change, but that its analysis is intellectually bankrupt, the changes it proposes are misconceived, and the policies it has already begun to implement will almost certainly make things worse.

At present, the U.S. politicians who think in terms of systems and mass movements for change are almost all right-wing ideologues like Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, and the denizens of think tanks like the Heritage Foundation. Their philosophy, now being turned into executive orders and legislation, sees government itself (the “administrative state”) as the chief obstacle to economic, social, and personal development. According to them, the solution to problems of vanishing economic opportunity, social decay, and endemic violence is to liberate the power of the oligarchs. Unfettered capitalism led by billionaire industrialists like Elon Musk will produce a new American “golden age.”

During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump pretended to be ignorant of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, but, clearly, its program of right-wing system change is now driving the MAGA bus. The key to Trump’s electoral victory was his success in organizing what Marxists call a “rotten bloc” – a cross-class coalition of giant capitalists, small businesspeople, and workers. Since deregulating the economy, crippling welfare programs, and slashing taxes on the rich are all obvious forms of class warfare, the Trumpers’ key need was to find some way to win discontented lower-class people to their banner. The answer was “America First” – an ideology designed to convince workers and retirees that their class interests and identities are irrelevant in a bonded ethno-national community that privileges and protects them. “However tough things may seem right now,” MAGA leaders tell their followers, “you are members of a Chosen Nation and masters on the global stage. Trust us — enriching the nation’s business elite will enrich you as well.”

A crucial feature of this appeal is that it splits the working class into two groups: workers in newer industries associated with technology and public services, many of whom are college-educated and urbanized, and workers in older manufacturing and retailing industries who are mostly high school graduates living in smaller towns and cities and in rural areas. Members of the first group tend to be slightly better paid than the second and like to think of themselves as a white-collar or “professional” middle class, but the vast majority are financially insecure, non-unionized workers with liberal cultural commitments. Even so, members of the older industrial group feel deprived relative to high-tech and service workers and are vulnerable to MAGA allegations that the latter are members of a government-dependent “elite.”

Trump and his movement have been quick to take advantage of this disunity among working people and the Democrats’ failure to heal the split.  So long as the division is defined in terms of competing cultural values and identity group interests, it remains unhealed and serves as a reliable source of MAGA power. No wonder that the Right’s answer to “identity politics” has been . . . identity politics!  Changing this dynamic requires a Leftist perspective that considers all working people, whatever their industrial and cultural base, members of a single social class. The name of the game is to redesign the system to provide all of them, collectively, with greater wealth, opportunity, purpose, and respect.

Where is the Leftist Project 2025?

The question that Democrats and other anti-Trumpers need to answer is this: what is your equivalent of Project 2025?  This suggests a series of other questions that sorely need answering.  For example: What are effective solutions to structural problems such as the wild increase in socioeconomic inequality, the vicious effects of global climate change, the skyrocketing costs of housing and other necessities, and the diversion of resources needed for civilian development to a trillion-dollar military budget?

Clearly, mild reforms like raising the minimum wage will not solve systemic problems of this scale. But to the extent that Trump’s opponents accept the self-censorship caused by political taboos like the taboos against economic planning, workers’ control, and any other reforms smacking of socialism, they disable themselves from providing credible solutions.

In the recent election, for example, MAGA demagogues succeeded in making illegal immigration topic # 1. Taboo-ridden Democrats were unwilling and unable to argue that socioeconomic planning can help us construct a humane and enforceable immigration system – one that could protect the jobs and incomes of native workers, relieve strained welfare systems, and help overcome our chronic labor shortage. All they could do was moralize about America as a nation of immigrants – an attractive vision, but not to low-wage workers living in underfunded communities and forced to compete for jobs and living space with desperate new arrivals.

In a similar way, the failure to offer solutions to systemic problems prevents many progressives from dealing successfully with crucial cultural, psychological, and spiritual issues exploited by the Right. What do anti-Trumpers have to say about the plague of loneliness that afflicts so many of us, the instability of American families, the explosion of drug addiction, or the difficulty of satisfying imperative needs for security, identity, self-esteem, and moral purpose? Again, although the issues may be defined as personal, the solutions – if they are to be effective – will involve transforming current systems.

The current wave of MAGA attacks on “woke” consciousness and institutions of affirmative action makes this clear. They clearly pose the question of how best to secure social and economic justice for people formerly marginalized because of their race, gender, or sexual preference. The answer, it seems to me, will not be simply to restore pre-existing DEI programs that implicitly force identity groups to compete for scarce resources.  Our aim should be to eliminate these system-generated scarcities – to supply a rich array of good jobs, rewarding educational opportunities, and comfortable living places for everyone. The goal is realizable, but it remains a utopian dream so long as we accept the current norms and taboos of an oligarchical profit system.

A concluding Biblical note

Under Trump and his pet ideologues Republicans have moved toward a more systemic approach to cultural and political policies. Why don’t anti-Trumpers make a similar shift but do it far better by identifying the system’s real problem – not the “Deep State” so much as “Deep Capital” – and proposing real solutions?

One reason is the conservatism of many Democrats – their unwillingness to recognize the failures and limitations of oligarchical capitalism, an imperialist foreign policy, and a winner-take-all political system that restricts people’s participation largely to electioneering and interest-group lobbying.  But there is another reason, too: an assumption often accepted that thinking in terms of systems and system-change exonerates bad people and relieves them of responsibility for their sins.

Some readers of this essay, for example, will very likely accuse me of “apologizing” for Trump by emphasizing the American system’s failures. I have no intention of justifying the Orange One’s intellectual or moral failings, which are many. But focusing on them to the extent of obscuring the social system’s role in generating injustice and violence mis-states the situation and makes it impossible to prevent later abuses.

Consider an original tale of abuses: the Cain and Abel story told in the book of Genesis. Cain clearly commits a sin by murdering his brother. God warns him in advance not to get carried away by jealous rage against Abel, but he doesn’t listen; he has a will of his own and he bloodily misuses it. Yet what provoked Cain’s jealousy was a systemic factor – the unequal treatment of the brothers. For reasons that remain unclear (although generations of rabbis tried vainly to identify them) God had accepted Abel’s sacrifice and rejected his. Along with Cain’s angry and disobedient nature, a system of parental favoritism was responsible for the subsequent violence.

Understanding this systemic context has implications for violence prevention; altering the “favored child” dynamic is one way to make a sibling rivalry less lethal. The context doesn’t absolve Cain of his sin, of course – nor does this existence of an oligarchical, profit- and power-obsessed American empire absolve Mr. Trump for his.  But without appreciating the system’s role in generating problems, one can’t offer credible solutions.

It is possible – and necessary – to move beyond liberal moralism and into the realm of systemic solutions. Rather than focus exclusively on Trump’s villainy or accept the kleptocratic nationalism of MAGA, we can describe the institutions that betray American working people and offer practical methods of transforming them. Doing this will take hard work, imagination, and the courage to reject political taboos, but without a Leftist alternative to Project 2025, people in pain will turn even more desperately to the Right.  Rosa Luxemburg’s famous description of the alternatives seems as apt now as ever: either we will have some form of socialism or we will have barbarism.