Jonathan Rauch, writing in The Atlantic, declares that “Fascism is not a territory with clearly marked boundaries but a constellation of characteristics. When you view the stars together, the constellation plainly appears.” When an executive in an otherwise representative government exhibits authoritarian tendencies, like controlling women’s right to contraception, or bypasses domestic legislature to launch aggressive wars abroad, we need not automatically label it fascism, since most human institutions allow room for administrative overreach. How, then, should we characterize the Trump phenomenon, especially in its second iteration? He was, after all, elected legitimately in two elections, and is the most impactful Republican politician in a generation. But fascism, Rauch reminds us, “is ideological, aggressive, and, at least in its early stages, revolutionary. It seeks to dominate politics, to crush resistance, and to rewrite the social contract.”
Individual, isolated doctrines, Rauch argues, like Trump’s preference for violence at home and abroad, his bulldozing of liberal norms of international law, politicization of legal institutions, usurpation of centers of potential dissent, anti-democracy, vicious imperialism, etc., have all been evident in past administrations, certainly recent ones. But even with the parallels to previous U.S. governments drawn, there still lingers a stubborn intuition that Donald Trump is nevertheless unique. Indeed, one week of news coverage of this administration reads like a distillation of the litany of scandals and criminality that characterized the preceding five or six. Surely, a markedly grimmer era has begun for these traits to have become trademark features of the minute-to-minute functioning of the state, combined with a rhetorical style steeped in contempt for detail, argument, transparency, or honesty.
Much of the debate about how to best capture the current moment has, rightly, concerned the finer aspects of terminology and definitions, and Rauch, prior to accepting the appropriateness of fascism for it, argued that Trump’s style of governance more resembled “patrimonialism … in which the state is treated as the personal property and family business of the leader.” Trump, himself, fits neatly into this category, guided by mere greed, but the contumacy of the coterie of more traditional ideologues around him has seen the descriptive power of patrimonialism fade into obsolescence. Underneath the commotion of incoherent buffoonery and ineptitude lies substantive ideology, only some of which conforms to traditional fascism. An anthropologist may proclaim that all ideological systems will differ in implementation based on the society in question, and here, the specifics are born out of the unholy alliance between finance-oriented neoliberalism and a class of billionaire technologists that could not have existed in preceding eras.
Gareth Dale and Mathieu Desan, drawing on some of Polanyi’s lesser-known writings from the 1930s, synthesize the matter as “fascism is capitalism saved through sacrificing democracy.” One could hardly disagree that the nexus between the corporate class and the executive branch, already almost undetectable, is now in a state of complete overlap, totally decoupled from the needs and interests of the general public. But this definition, not unlike Trotsky’s in the same period, is insufficient since capitalism, in all its American peculiarities, has not faced a meaningful threat from below for decades. The rapid concentration of wealth and its associated political power have both depleted the democratic threat and yielded a mongrel form of capitalism that generates tremendous private profit under the full protection of state power against market forces. Far from sacrosanct, talk of free trade and anti-monopoly no longer evokes the scholastic mythologies once attached to them, with trade barriers erected as phalanxes against randomly chosen economic rivals, including penguins. Drivers of the so-called AI boom are paradigmatic conspirators of these naked strategic alliances. Cory Doctorow writes, “The tech industry and AI boosters are made for each other. Tech uses all kinds of gimmicks and sleights in proving that users are adopting AI, and AI uses similar gimmicks to prove that AI represents an unfathomably vast market opportunity.” Far from products of rugged entrepreneurism, AI companies have colluded regularly against challenges in the corporate sphere. They feed habitually at the public trough, and the resulting excrement powers a speculative bubble shaped entirely by their frivolity.
In the end, commentators dismiss the fascist characterization solely on the fact that Trump lacks the ideological literacy that informed previous, genuinely fascist figures. Hitler drew upon Carlyle’s Great Man fallacies, Gobineau’s inequality among races, and the visceral antisemitism depicted in Wagner’s Die Miestersinger. Trump, himself, publicly avoided having to name a character in Les Misérables, a production of which he attended with his wife Melania last year. Instead, he stages photo ops with Kid Rock and Hell’s Angels. This does not, however, preclude the notion that Trump is motivated by a preexisting race-hate and contempt for working people, rooted in his ultra-wealthy upbringing and cloistered life of lechery, a world in which both his business and personal advances are seldom refused. Such impulses just seem to operate largely without the encouragement of external advice.
The milieu in which Trump now finds himself is comprised of more classical ideologues, overseeing their own specific domains while Trump focuses his wrecking ball on the barriers to the absolute reign of corporate interests. But these are not elitists of old, lazily invoking Sowell and Friedman only when required to justify status quo structures of social domination. Without having to couch them in high-minded values or conservative virtue, the natural end-goals of these doctrines can be stated simply. The “neo-monarchist” and “Dark Enlightenment” frameworks articulated by Curtis Yarvin, the warped anti-immigration economics of George Borjas, or the more familiar American-style nativism of Steve Bannon—delivered in his patented vulgarity—all comport deftly with Trump’s overall agenda, without him having necessarily sought inspiration from such figures. In another break with history, Trump’s brand of fascism does not aim to simply feed on the ultra-wealthy donor base that has fostered it. Rather, the attitudes of what Trotsky once called capitalism’s “undigested barbarism” now direct the thinking of the wealthiest people in the world, and their banner has hardly been bestowed upon them by despair. To be sure, Trump’s relationships with individual oligarchs may sour, but the temporary departure of, say, Elon Musk from the president’s inner-circle signals neither a wholesale change in the goals of oligarchy, nor in the fundamental symbiosis now at play. With DOGE’s unprecedented raids on stockpiles of federal information, “Musk’s plan is to bring huge amounts of government data together, to create deeply personal profiles on individual Americans”—for the betterment of his AI empire, yes, but also to target political opponents and purge voter rolls of Democrats, all of which gratifies Trump’s childish wrath.
Western states whose very identities were once marked by the defeat of Nazism are now using their gamut of repressive tools to persecute enemies like Antifa, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and other activists as alleged terrorists. Earlier whispers of this impending reversal always portended a dark future. Just as discussion over the causes of the Civil War dips dangerously into an abstract debate about the nature of state’s rights, discussion of the Second World War and its aftermath risks degenerating into ruminations about the potential strategic benefits that might have accrued from an alliance with fascism.
Chomsky warned more than 30 years ago, “Parts of this picture may well become the accepted doctrine of the future, given its utility for power interests,” especially the failure of U.S. war-planners to see “opportunities for a separate peace with Hitler that would have left the Germans and the Russians to slaughter one another, with the US and Britain standing back until it came time to pick up the pieces.” Noted German historian Ernst Nolte, for example, argued that “Hitler had good reasons to be convinced of the determination of his enemies [the Bolsheviks and the Jews] to annihilate him.” Pat Buchanan, who has occasionally tried his hand at history, writes in a 2008 book that Hitler was not the “evil genius” who had plotted a “series of preconceived and brilliant moves on the chessboard of Europe.” Rather, says Buchanan, “most of his actions were taken in spontaneous reaction to situations created by his adversaries.” Nazi Germany therefore launched a series of defensive wars aimed at safeguarding its sovereignty from the combined conspiracy of Communists and Jews. In 2004, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Nicholas Kristof uses a hysterical denunciation of Vladimir Putin’s Russia as an opportunity to shore up the economic case, seeing as how the ex-KGB expansionist was “guiding Russia … into fascism.” But before fully exposing himself to the charge of fearmongering, we receive the following assurance: “Still, a fascist Russia is a much better thing than a Communist Russia,” the crucial difference being the economic compatibility of classical fascism with American state-capitalism. “Communism was a failed economic system, while Franco’s Spain, General Pinochet’s Chile and the others generated solid economic growth, a middle class and international contacts.” That Kristof’s preference for fascism is a natural outgrowth of U.S. support of Franco, installation of Pinochet, and similar disposition toward “the others” is no accident.
These ideas, propagated by a late German conservative, another by a former U.S. presidential hopeful, and the last by a liberal journalist, share more than an unsettling similarity with those of the new crop of Western reactionaries, whose fascist suggestions have finally found, in Trump, their outspoken champion.
Part of this dreadful revisionism grows out of the remarkable compatibility between conceptions of corporate capitalism and European fascism. The Second World War was essentially a brief abeyance in this organic affinity. In his essay, “Fascism and the American Scene,” the introduction to Daniel Guerin’s 1938 study Fascism and Big Business, Dwight MacDonald called fascism of the German and Italian varieties “not the twin of American capitalism,” but “its older brother,” whose “seeds are latent in every capitalist economy,” just given appropriate growing room in Europe. In other words, fascism, or something approximating it, can take root in any society thoroughly infiltrated by capitalist hierarchies, and its vanguards need not be drawn from one discernable class. Nor its enemies. In the Trumpian variant, scapegoats burdened with the fall of American Greatness are myriad, constituting a wide cross-section of ethnicities and wealth.
Capital is easily stripped of the inclusionary and liberal democratic fictions attributed to it by the great theorists of the 18th century. MacDonald’s remark not only draws parallels between the monopolistic tendencies of modern industry in wartime Europe and the U.S., but also recalls the racism, terror, and hierarchies that were always vital to the formulation of national heritage on both sides of the Atlantic, an “embryonic form” fertile for authoritarian takeover. Most of the institutional structure that underpins Trump’s style of governance has been in place for decades.
Rank-and-file Republicans have basically gone along with the Trump program, its central goals not sufficiently deviating from their own to warrant reconsideration. The Party of the Rich is still just that, but its most opportunistic members no longer view the anti-woke identity politics card as mere raw meat thrown to the cruder elements of the party base; it is now used to undo the progress that has slowly atoned for the original sins of the United States—slavery and the extermination of the native population—becoming less audacious to promulgate publicly in the last year.
Fealty is paid to the law only when it conforms to the agenda, and summarily executed when it does not, and that is where the administration differs most radically from its forebears. The ability to hold the administration to the letter of the law has effectively vanished. A Georgetown law professor says that Minnesota’s legal efforts to slow federal attacks on the state’s residents have 10th Amendment-centric arguments “designed for novel times,” when the federal government asserts the right to wage war on citizens and non-citizens alike. At the end of January, with two Minnesotans dead and thousands of others detained, Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a written ultimatum to Governor Walz, offering a dial-back of the federal assault in exchange for the state’s voter rolls and other sensitive information on its residents. So goes the lie that Trump’s operations have anything to do with immigration enforcement; they have everything to do with hacking down the legitimacy of whatever elections are scheduled ahead. “Our existing legal doctrines were not designed for rampant lawlessness on the part of the executive,” Professor Stephen I. Vladeck added.
Inured to the impenetrable posturing of Congress and seemingly incurable corporate theft, the dead conscience of Americans was suddenly quickened into life by widely circulated footage of ICE abuses on social media and mainstream news, which showed a plague of violence and degradation so severe and unbounded as to upset citizens’ core assumptions about their liberty and civil rights. According to the Marist Poll, by the end of January 2026, the month that saw the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, 65% of Americans held that the actions of ICE had gone too far. Just as observers were shrugging off the lack of public engagement, an extraordinary wave of dystopian violence handed Gandhian logic its epochal vindication, and public pressure on the administration mounted in force.
Anti-ICE sentiment exploded throughout the country and allowed otherwise flaccid Democratic politicians to quickly and cynically shore up their liberal credentials, casting themselves as courageous adversaries standing against unprecedented tyranny, even as they continue to represent or capitulate to the ruling billionaire class. President Obama’s former Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel now supports ending military aid to Israel, heretofore subsidized by the American taxpayer. He condemns “[Trump’s] personal enrichment, the ICE-induced chaos in Minnesota and Oregon, the pardons for Jan. 6 criminals and the alienation of traditional democratic allies overseas,” and implores Democrats “to lean heavily into the notion that Republican members of Congress are acting as the president’s enablers,” while appealing to “swing voters who now represent nearly half the electorate and will determine our electoral success”—the same man also infamously exclaimed “Fuck the UAW” during auto industry bailout discussions in 2010 and closed 50 public schools in Chicago during his term as mayor. California Governor Gavin Newsom has been campaigning on an anti-Trump platform that condemns his authoritarianism and desire to compromise electoral integrity, while also arguing against the state’s one-time 5% billionaire tax as too onerous for the state’s wealthiest investors. “The impact of a one-time tax does not solve an ongoing structural challenge,” says Newsom, just as he sits down for an interview with Ben Shapiro and teases the president for falling asleep during televised meetings. Retiring Illinois Senator Dick Durbin made sure that press cameras were tightly affixed to his predictably failed efforts to gain access to the Broadview ICE detention facility, but hesitated not to join Republicans to vote to end the federal government shutdown without extending crucial healthcare subsidies for ACA enrollees. The liberal cause has been reduced to opposing state tyranny, no longer concerned with correcting class inequalities, a project in which the Democrats have long been complicit. Schumer, Jeffries, and the rest are surely grateful to the GOP for allowing them to appear as an opposition party again. “These idiots are making our jobs a lot easier,” says Charlie Bailey, chair of the Democrats in Georgia.
Trump has hinted uncomfortably at the notion that he is a dictator, and critics continue to hammer away at the point that opposition candidates, most of whom are Democrats, must do their best to sweep the upcoming midterm elections to regain the reins of the republic. To be sure, this is likely one of the only methods by which Americans will be able to arrest the unprecedented assault on their collective rights, civil liberties, and economy. But the precipitous slide in GOP popularity constitutes more than just healthy ground for progressive electoral prospects. The fact that so little has been done on the part of Republicans to correct it, to pivot into a direction more aligned with public opinion and thereby spare themselves perhaps the worst electoral defeat in the history of the country, also indicates a lack of concern. From the perspective of the administration and its loyal servants, of what relevance is this slide if all foreseeable elections are to be suspended indefinitely?
During his 2016 campaign, Trump laid out his intent to integrate the executive branch into his own personal endeavors of wealth-maximization. “My whole life I’ve been greedy, greedy, greedy. I’ve grabbed all the money I could get. I’m so greedy. But now I want to be greedy for the United States. I want to grab all that money. I’m going to be greedy for the United States.” Fast-forward to October 2026, Trump is still the best articulator of his own motives, shoving side concerns over exploding energy costs. “I don’t give a damn, I’m going to say it—we’re making a freaking fortune.” Establishment constraints prevented this from materializing then, but such annoyances have been extinguished this time around. With the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran showing little sign of resolution beyond the shaky ceasefire currently in place, adding to the financial desperation of Americans, Trump tells reporters, “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation,” a “perfect statement” that he would not hesitate to make again. The man’s attitude is not just cavalier, it is careless. Being so thoroughly insulated from criticism and inconvenient information, Trump feels little compunction to alleviate the staggering precarity of American voters, especially those in the rural counties that elected him, seeing little reason to doubt his party’s imminent success come November.
In light of all these clear expressions of a fascism on the rise, perhaps it is not so important to spill more ink on how precisely it fits into the broader history of authoritarian movements. As already noted, much of what Trump has achieved enjoys bipartisan utility. Smashing campus protests and throttling academic freedom to near death, empowering the Silicon Valley billionaires, maintaining the imbalanced accumulation of wealth, antagonizing China, using Israel as a battering ram against the Palestinians and Iran, etc., all were either initiated by Democrats or received their acquiescent nods from across the aisle. For this reason, it is unlikely that much effort will be made on the part of mainstream Democratic leaders to mend the lacerations Trump has inflicted upon American society after his (expected) departure. The Democrats’ perilous identity politics gambit, plugged clumsily as the party’s saving grace following its betrayal of the white working class, has been quietly undercut in the public and private sector by the GOP’s exceedingly weighty Kulturkampf. One recent analysis that links corporate managerial practices with current manifestations of fascism reminds us that “the fact that hundreds of American companies from all sectors and industries have by now abandoned their DEI programs—and have done so well before the Trump administration came to power in early 2025—points to the fact that those fascist elements are by now widely accepted in business in general.”
Trump’s energies are proudly and rapidly returning the bellwethers of American innovation to a bankrupt form of social organization. State institutions are being starved into dissolution, with no intention of replacing them, even in privatized forms. Academic departments that have been placed under federal conservatorship in the wake of the 2024 Gaza encampments are being subjected to the creative destruction of not only Linda McMahon’s Department of Education but also the billionaire alumni classes, who command fantastic funding power, repurposing universities to ensure more “patriotic” output, combating “other endeavors that could run afoul of conservative orthodoxy, such as centers for the study of climate change or gender and sexuality.” In particular, the press reported, “history departments could come under fire for courses that federal officials believed portray slavery and segregation too negatively.” In their newly published interrogation of money-power, Jayadev and Mason capture the gravity of dismantling publicly funded institutions not because they are inefficient or overrun with twee wokeism, but because they are impediments to ruling class greed. In the U.S., “universities—one of the country’s most successful industries—are basically worker collectives engaged in the production of decommodified knowledge, with minimal direct role for profit.” Having successfully frozen the progress of this institutional tradition, talk of the virtuous free market has simultaneously disappeared, sobered by the stark reality of pervasive corporate monopolies, a residue of the defunct neoliberal experiment.
In all the psychological diagnoses offered by observers of Trump’s conduct and public persona, one obvious parallel has mysteriously escaped application; that is, in all his life’s endeavors, his opportunism stalks with all the relentless predations of a rapist—a King Tarquin, seeing everywhere a sleeping Lucrece, loath to brook rejection at any level. His money, his language, his associations, his domineering gesticulations towards female reporters, his derisions of even his own cronies, all beckon the prerogatives of a ruling class in the throes of unchecked misogyny. Roughly a decade ago, however, an online campaign to raise awareness of rampant sexual abuse among elites renewed scrutiny of men like Trump, who later pad out millions in a settlement to accuser E Jean Carroll, ushering in a new era of protest and sympathy. After having made breach in Minneapolis, Trump saw a spontaneously organized resistance unwilling to ingest the raw meat of xenophobia readily consumed by his more loyal base and was caught off guard by the solidarity of ordinary, especially white, Americans with their immigrant neighbors. We need not fulminate over the pages of Project 2025 to have foreseen what was already in motion, but how far back must we search for a suitable metric against which we can evaluate the novelty of the Trumpian menace?
New Alignments
It is only the composition of our current ruling elite that should come as a surprise, not its rapacity, given that for more than four decades, our socioeconomic system empowered a small class of mostly Wall Street-based financial institutions—sometimes referred to by the acronym FIRE (finance, insurance, real estate). In the fallout of the Great Recession (2008-9), beginning with the erasure of up to $8 trillion in housing wealth, the FIRE class was outed in disgrace as both its chief enablers and benefactors. At the same time, Silicon Valley was making vital inroads into many of these same industries, adding defense, cryptocurrency, and surveillance, quietly leading the charge against Occupy’s calls for reinforcement of antitrust regulation and corporate accountability. “The result,” remarks Thomas Ferguson, “was the formation of a ‘Red Tech’ bloc that for the time being is firmly massed behind Trump,” having once been a Democratic malignancy. On the eve of his first electoral victory in 2016, the degree of corporate concentration within big tech had reached staggering levels, and continued unabated. “Soon,” wrote historian Margaret O’Mara, “it became clear that the surest way for a company to make money in the world of the new titans was to be acquired by one of them. By mid-2018, Facebook had made 67 acquisitions, Amazon had made 91, and Google had made 214,” owing to the spectacular advantages awarded them by “the angel that had been there since the very beginning: the U.S. government.”
Executives of Red Tech also proved to be quick learners. The spoils of their newfound wealth were both protected and greatly expanded under the U.S. tax-code, an “elaborate shell game—entirely permissible under IRS rules,” notes O’Mara. Borrowing against assets, to name one such skill of the game, enabled Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison to amass a fortune upwards of $230 billion, and “become the boss, landlord, or both” of Hawaii’s sixth largest island, “a stunning experiment in opulence and power,” according to Ray Madoff’s recent work on what she deems an “American aristocracy.” Aside from taxpayer support, which typically foots the bill in the form of research, development, and procurement, the grievously rigged tax-code is perhaps the single most important underwriter of the Silicon Valley gang, and must therefore not be reformed. “In the early 2010s,” O’Mara finds, “this arrangement became a gold mine for software companies, which, because of their global reach and the ethereal nature of their product, were able to shift profits from high- to low-tax jurisdictions. … Tech firms further reduced their tax bills by writing off stock options, depreciation of facilities, and expenditures on R&D.” How appropriate it is, that, for Red Tech, the path to individual fiefdoms is paved by eluding social obligations.
Christopher Wylie, the insider who blew the whistle on the Cambridge Analytica scandal, writes in his definitive expose that, “There are two types of billionaires: those who can never make enough money and those who, after making enough to last multiple lifetimes, turn their attention to changing the world.” By the time of Trump’s second inauguration, our system had produced a sordid assortment of both—the avaricious, the imaginative, and a new, hybrid creature whose planetary reveries hearken back to Cecil Rhodes. “[Cambridge Analytica’s] sole purpose was to cannibalize the Republican Party and remold American culture,” Wylie continues, to a state from which it can issue the clarion call declaring the end of the Enlightenment, with democracy, multi-ethnic coexistence, gender equality, and even individual agency having lost their appeal. For alt-right vanguards like Steve Bannon, Robert Mercer, and Peter Thiel, CA was a purely political venture, functioning like a super PAC with inexhaustible coffers and undeniable success. Even after having lost the popular vote in 2016 by roughly three million votes, Trump infamously secured the necessary 46 electors with 80,000 voters in keys counties in the states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, two of which were important battlegrounds targeted by CA machinations. The firm also lent its creepy services to Nigel Farage and UK Independence Party, Britain’s homegrown right-wing insurgency, illustrating that the conspiracy to eliminate democracy is global. Indeed, the paltry $644,000 fine that Facebook paid for its own involvement in this data breach was to the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office.
Burgeoning technologies of data-harvesting, surveillance, cryptocurrency, robotics, and international trade protections are the material tools by which Red Tech seeks to construct its fantastically demented, idealized future, whose extreme vision of exclusivity makes prevailing oligarchy look like a DEI utopia. Some of its most prominent figures are white South Africans who came of age during apartheid, and, having imported the system’s hierarchies, yearn to see workers return to their traditional roles of servility and subordination. AI, then, is merely the latest weapon in enforcing class-discipline that would see human labor groveling for inclusion in the enterprise of the future, a goal squarely in not only the fascist tradition, but also in its balmier antecedent, capitalism, to whose abusive logic we have grown numb. Little is made of the fact that AI’s most ardent ambassadors are also those who stand to gain most handsomely from what we are told is its inevitable displacement of the workforce, a temporary but necessary pain of market maturation, like the growing pains that accompanied outsourcing and automation.
At the 2026 World Economic Forum, Dario Amodei, guru of Anthropic PBC, implored that “government will need to play a role in navigating the massive displacement in jobs that could result from advances in AI,” which otherwise pushes us toward a “future with 5% to 10% GDP growth and 10% unemployment.” Tech companies, in this vision, fuel GDP growth and gobble up the accruing profits, then expect the government to step in and rescue hapless mobs of workers whose skills were made superfluous by the inevitable march towards progress. Perhaps more a threat than a premonition, before this dour experiment in tormenting the workforce has run its course, the most vulnerable will be made to suffer needlessly.
Hypotheticals involving AI are never pitched as moments of tremendous liberatory potential. It ought to be patently obvious that the massive produce of AI “learning” could be harnessed to drastically reduce work hours and maximize leisure, leaving people to pursue more creative and meaningful activities, but this is insufficiently patriotic. Meta recently laid off close to 8,000 of its workforce, having leached the skillset of this contingent of disposables to power the new wave of its “superintelligent” assistants. The protests of employees illustrated clearly why they had been fired, after “creating their own A.I. replacements” whose programming will accommodate the latest innovations in planned obsolescence. At least workers were sent home with a warm note of gratitude from Mark Zuckerberg.
Whereas the fascist regimes of the preceding century initiated massive state expenditures to rescue their moribund economies, Red Tech’s rewards to the precariat are rather pathetic. The industry is a major booster of UBI, a band-aid prescribed to a much larger problem of declining share of wages to corporate income. Data centers are hardly the panacea for the crisis of joblessness accelerated by the industry’s own technology, employing a paltry operational workforce. A growing corpus of scientific literature demonstrates the ruinous effects of social media platforms on mental health and traditional community bonds. In Chicago, Mayor Brandon Johnson successfully couched his proposal for the city’s SMART tax on these entities in a critique of “higher trends of depression, anxiety and mental illness – especially in our young people,” likening the technology to tobacco use.
“This is all supposed to help sustain human life, when all the indicators point to a world of place-based creative destruction in which the increasing pace of destruction steadily outstrips our ability to create a viable alternative,” David Harvey writes in his most recent work. More and more of human life has been inoculated against the threat of democratic influence, as social institutions break and reform, with an almost hypnotic captivation, into mere weapons that police challenges to business control, turning regulators into the regulated. Harvey presents a hellish future in which a chilled civil society, in its passivity, fuels the positive feedback loop of looming dystopia. “A new round of moonshots is a delusional alternative that is presented as a new step for humanity when it is nothing more than the product of interstate competition between the United States and China for military control over outer space. The institutional arrangements for adequate governance in the contemporary world are totally unable to deal with problems that will, in fact, take some form of authority, perhaps even dictatorship, to address. If this is so, then the only interesting question is whether the coming dictatorship might be benevolent or malevolent.” Under the malevolent dictatorship of the ultra-wealthy, a sizable portion of the electorate enthusiastically advocates for its own defeat, and democracy fails to be the automatic prescription for popular discontents.
Foreign Policy Aspects
Never did the framework of international humanitarian law enjoyed meticulous adherence, but under Trump, it has been utterly overturned. Mark Carney articulated this unspoken awareness in his heralded Davos address: “We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.” So long as global heads of state could keep up appearances and avoid drawing too much attention to the gross imbalance of power between the United States and the rest of the world, the existing international order could carry on without significant disruption. This charade is no longer sustainable, in Carney’s frank admission.
“Carney is right that something fundamental has shifted,” says analyst Matias Spektor. “But in calling for middle and emerging powers to stop paying lip service to a broken system, he underestimates what else vanishes when pretense disappears.” It was commonplace for acts of imperialism in the postwar era to be preceded by invocations of law, order, containment, and even justice. From Vietnam to Lebanon, Iraq to the Dominican Republic, a thin cloak of justification was invariably offered, but under “his second term, Trump has stripped away the language of justification altogether.” Sure, abandoning prevailing norms of hypocrisy may seem like an honorable shift towards honesty, Spektor continues, but “[w]ithout the pressures of hypocrisy to constrain it, power operates with fewer buffers and mediating institutions,” accountable to nothing but the balance-sheets of domination and control. Hegseth’s renaming of the Department of Defense to the Department of War is another such regrettable return to truth. The shift also eliminates the last rungs on which the Global South could ascend to a semblance of legal parity with the Great Powers on the world stage. To the dustbin with so much woke debris, as Hegseth would have it.
Just as the Gambino crime family underwent a change in style in the mid-1980s, from Castellano’s polish and outward veneer of legitimacy, to Gotti’s affected heroism and boorish contempt for established law, by now, many commentators acknowledge that the differences between many of Trump’s policies and those of his predecessors are only skin-deep. “Scratch the surface, and the differences fade,” write Lee Schlenker and Adam Weinstein at Foreign Policy. With Trump’s issuance of his corollary to the Monroe Doctrine in Venezuela, “Washington has again intervened militarily abroad in contravention of international law and without congressional authorization”—again, not abnormally, but now without high-minded appeals to any morally defensible goal. To the contrary, threats against foreign adversaries, most of whom are exactly the same as before, are today made openly, but Trump’s signature style has not given way to a whole-scale reevaluation of the belligerent U.S. relationship with international law. Having several times threatened Iranian civilization with genocide—a contemptuous violation of the UN Charter and Rome Statute for those remaining wide-eyed idealists still concerned with matters of antiquity—Trump has merely taken advantage of President Reagan’s porous ratification of the 1948 Genocide Convention, whose opponents once feared could be used against the U.S. for its treatment of Native and African-Americans. The threats, coupled with his administration’s concerted efforts to erase the plight the two populations in question, place Trump squarely in the trajectory of American politics.
Liberals lamented the president’s beastly rhetoric; if only the man had passed through a more traditional and dignified career in politics to arrest such obscene leakages from the unconscious. The “ego is an organization,” says Freud, “and the id is not.” Notwithstanding the characteristic self-righteousness of American liberals, Trump’s rampages in South America resembled other crimes they had failed to condemn before.
The kidnapping of President Nicolas Maduro was practically a replay of President H.W. Bush’s capture of Manuel Noreiga in December 1989. Legally, Trump’s operation was the progeny of then-Assistant Attorney General William Barr’s decades-old doctrine supposing that the “President had the ‘inherent constitutional authority’ to arrest individuals abroad ‘even if those actions contravene customary international law’ and ‘even if they contravene unexecuted treaties or treaty provisions, such as Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter,’ which bars threats and use of force among member states except in self-defense.” No surprise, then, that Trump enlisted the services of the same man during his first term to support Juan Guaido’s coup attempt against the Venezuelan president in April 2019, even if such support, or a “rendition” operation, would result in the assassination of Maduro. As if to illustrate that its immunity carries global implications, the U.S. and its Israeli client opened their joint February 28thaggression against Iran by murdering Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, as well as its entire top-level military command.
Again, this pattern extends back even further, into the most liberal administration of the last 65 years. At the end of August 1962, a secret memorandum sent from State Department Consultant Walt Rostow to National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy read that a policy of sabotage in Cuba consistent with international law was preferable, “but if we have a legal basis satisfying to ourselves, a certain degree of unilateral, of ‘High Noon’ action is probably acceptable.” Then, as now, we see that splendid combination of arrogance, chauvinism, and hypocrisy transcending hemispheres. “The Soviets may argue that we have emplaced nuclear weapons close to their borders [in Italy and Turkey],” Rostow continued. “Our response should be that this hemisphere has set up its own regional security arrangements; that the U.S. is part of this hemisphere; and that we intend by our own force and with those allies who read the hemispheric documents as we do to enforce those regulations.” The U.S. is, of course, exceptional in this regard, as it, alone, can fabricate such legal syllogisms for its violence without fear of substantial reprisal on the world stage. The Russians and Chinese are free to lament quietly.
Officially, we are told, the Trump-Hegseth-Rubio gang is fighting terrorists and severing umbilical cords from the terrorist regimes that sustain them; Iran for Hezbollah, and now Cuba for Venezuela. In the course of their exploits, we have also witnessed some of the most rank corruption ever committed by the U.S. executive, enriching Trump and his invertebrate collaborators as they carry out what Justice Robert Jackson at the Nuremberg Tribunals called the “supreme international crime” of aggression in Iran and elsewhere, while demonstrating truly unique incompetence. As noted earlier, fascist foreign policy prefaces imperialism with defensive and virtuous pretexts, always, by sheer coincidence, obliterating its foes. Can the proposition that a clique of thieves and prevaricators has tasked itself with eliminating authoritarianism abroad be taken seriously? We are reminded of the disgusting habits of pre-revolutionary French clergy, whose hypocrisy ran so deep, their noble pretenses and their hedonistic pursuits were one and the same:
One has chosen five bishops,
All marked by syphilis,
To reform the gay monks.
Can one whiten ebony with black ink?
Much is being made of an old historical current, that establishment Democrats would rather cede electability to Republicans than to entertain compromises with the progressive faction of their own party. Panic ensued within the Democratic leadership following the DSA gains in New York. Democratic Representative Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey was one of 15 Congressmen pledging that “We are capitalist, not socialist,” offering other platitudes about commitment to fiscal discipline and free speech, all consistent with Trump’s ignorant hysterics regarding the ascendant Communist threat. As an illustration of terminological vacuity, Gottheimer further complained that the progressive insurgency was “using Tea Party tactics and trying to divide up the country and pray to socialist ideals,” recognizing that resentment for the status quo emanates from a wide breadth of society. In a sensitive election year, party leaders have again calculated that containing the youthful energies seeking to alter the DNC platform is more important than incorporating them into a viable challenge to the uncontested reign of corporate power. Efforts to seek some kind of feeble, sanitized accommodation with progressives are but another phase in the protracted suicide of the party, eroding more of its popular base and feeding a terrifying trend of anti-politics and Republican demagoguery. True, as Pew Research Center reports, voter turnout in recent elections has been unusually high, but in 2024, eligible non-voters turned out and “favored Trump by a margin of 54%-42%,” reflecting “intensifying political polarization during the past decade, a period in which growing partisan antipathy has raised the stakes of election outcomes in the minds of many voters.” A subsection of the ultra-wealthy has energized the politically apathetic to correct the iniquities present in their daily lives, caused almost exclusively by the ultra-wealthy.
The frissons of fascistic national belonging provide for the accepted group an easy means by which modern alienation is overcome. The chauvinism of individually organized, distinct groups constitutes the seeds of the nation-state—miniature, solidified empires—but absconds the political question of how to successfully integrate heterogeneous societies on the basis of solidarity and egalitarian principles. Trumpian fascism is simultaneously old and aberrant, its political and economic roots apparent to those whose dissatisfaction predates the regressive moment into which we have been dragged.
After a towering and enduring analysis, economist Robert Brady concludes his study Business as a System of Power by identifying predominant islands of concentrated wealth and corporate decision-making. “And nothing fundamental in history, program, structure of organization, or social outlook divides clearly the policies of the [Nazi] Spitzenverbände within the ‘totalitarian’ countries from those of the liberal-capitalist states.” The distinctions, he demonstrates, are rather superficial, with the ultimate system taking different forms based on unavoidable historical context. “The differences here between the language of a patriarchal imperialist such as the divine Augustus of early imperial Rome or of the Benevolent Despots of eighteenth-century Europe on the one hand, and that of an Ivy Lee or a Robert Levy on the other, is not one of content, nor even of felicity of phrase and refinement of expression, but of the times and the fields of application.” Close attention must now be paid to ensuring that institutional oppression is confronted with long-term goals in mind, such that the arc of progress continues beyond the undoing of this horror show under the direction of one man.
