There’s something about Trump that draws comparisons with Communism. The one I’ve heard most is the Cultural Revolution, where Chairman Mao incited a rebellion against the state he ostensibly led, with the Great Leap Forward (rapid economic transformation through absurd magical thinking) as a close second. Mao does not exhaust the field, however. There is a rich vein of ironic parallels to be found in the career of Mikhail Gorbachev. Here I am drawing on Vladislav M. Zubok’s Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union, which I discussed at greater length here.

There are any number of parallels that immediately leap to mind — such as their strange trust in their country’s historical enemies (Reagan for Gorbachev, Putin for Trump), their tendency to indulge in personal projects instead of governing (writing Marxist theory for Gorbachev, golfing for Trump) or even the fact that both have a bizarre visual feature on their head (the birthmark and the combover, respectively).

More informative, though, are the parallel dynamics of their careers. The first is that both shocked the political establishment with their radicalism. In both cases, establishment figures assumed they would be a fresh outsider face (Trump as a political novice, Gorbachev as the first Soviet leader born after the Russian Revolution) who could be controlled. In fact, in the case of Gorbachev it was likely that the need to control him didn’t even occur to most of the relevant power brokers, since he had previously been such a “go along to get along” kind of guy. But both Gorbachev and Trump 2.0 moved much faster and made much bigger changes than anyone was anticipating. In Gorbachev’s case, the establishment was too blindsided to do much of anything prior to the abortive coup attempt (famous for the Soviet TV station’s decision to play Swan Lake on repeat for the duration rather than report on events), and this time around it doesn’t seem like much of anyone with institutional power is making serious plans to counter Trump.

The nature of those rapid changes also bears comparison. Perhaps most notably, Gorbachev’s decision to simply leave the Eastern Bloc countries to their own devices was as shocking to Soviet insiders as Trump’s omni-trade war has been to their American counterparts. This decision is representative of a broader trend — their rapid changes tended to be strangely self-undermining. Gorbachev seems to have believed he would gain some moral authority and shed an economic burden by abandoning the Warsaw Pact, just as Trump claims to be righting a major wrong in the world trade system by fighting back against our allies’ supposed parasitism. In practice, though, both moves seriously undercut the sources of the respective superpower’s sway on global events.

The same was true domestically. Gorbachev styled himself as a new Lenin, instituting a renewed revolution to fully actualize socialism in its ideal form — including an eventual transition to democracy. Ironically, though, he ruled more purely dictatorially than most post-Stalin Soviet leaders, even as he continually undercut the sources of his own power. Key to his plan to democratize the Soviet Union was the ambition of reenvigorating the individual republics and their local “soviets” — moves that wound up stoking nationalistic fervor that had mostly lain dormant, which (shockingly!) proved to be counter to Gorbachev’s socialist goals. And though this analogy is admittedly a bit strained, both also made changes to the “official” history of their countries that hurt their legitimacy — Gorbachev by belatedly admitting the truth that the Baltic states had been annexed by force (morally good, tactically stupid) and Trump by hamfistedly imposing a white supremacist narrative to counter the scourge of “woke” (morally evil, also tactically stupid).

Similarly, the attempted reform of the Soviet economy took on a DOGE-like “move fast and break things” tone, as the few people who still had some idea how the planning system worked were sidelined and the functioning systems were gummed up. The attempt to make the constituent republics “real” again also had the effect of severely disrupting supply chains, similar to Trump’s antics. Contrary to the hagiography by which Gorbachev wisely oversaw the inevitable dissolution of the Soviet Union, the events of his rule were chaotic and unpredictable to almost everyone involved, due to the unique combination of naivety and recklessness he brought to the table.

In summary, both were aspiring revolutionary dictators, aiming to revive an idealized heroic national past, and both relentlessly destroyed the state capacity necessary to carry out their stated goals. Both responded to economic discontent by heedlessly making things even worse. Both abandoned allies and cozied up to long-time enemies who did not actually have their nation’s interests at heart.

Where the parallel begins to break down is that Gorbachev’s intentional stoking of intra-Union nationalism wound up creating independent power centers that ultimately dissolved his country out from under him. A few months into the Trump administration, we don’t seem to be very far down that road — though arbitrarily witholding federal funding to “blue” states could do for state-level identification what Trump’s abominable threats have done to Canadian nationalism. Maybe Gavin Newsom will turn out to be America’s Boris Yeltsin, withdrawing the single biggest constituent unit from a tottering federal structure (though of course California is proportionally nowhere near as dominant as the Russian “Republic” was within the USSR).

And of course, for most Western readers, the parallel rankles because Trump is bad and Gorbachev was good. Personally, I’m not so sure that dissolving a major world power, permanently racheting down the life prospects of everyone in the successor nations, and abandoning a major region of the world to what amounts to mafia rule was an unalloyed good. If the choice were between the continued existence of the USSR and the constituent republics becoming nice, normal, prosperous liberal democracies, obviously the latter outcome holds considerable appeal — but it is not remotely what happened, nor is there really any reason to imagine that option was on the table. Meanwhile, judging from the early days of Trump’s second term, the world may well regard the dissolution of the United States with relief by the time he’s done.

If that sounds impossible to you, well, the dissolution of the Soviet Union would have sounded impossible to everyone in the early 80s — from Gorbachev and Reagan all the way on down. A superpower doesn’t just destroy itself! That would be crazy! But sometimes crazy things happen. We unfortunately seem to be living through one example — hence the value of thinking through a previous case.

There are a number of candidates for “the book that predicted Trump,” from Octavia Butler’s eerily prescient near-future dystopia that purported to “Make America Great Again” to Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind. I have occasionally quipped that Creepiness is the book that truly deserves the title. There is a moment of truth there — I do argue that the creepiness trend was in large part about the breakdown of white masculinity — but it was mostly just a joke about the almost overwhelming creepiness of Trump himself. More recently, though, it has dawned on me that another book in the series may deserve some prophetic credit, namely Why We Love Sociopaths. Or rather, it seems to have initially dawned on Aaron Bady, who tweeted about it a few times, and that prompted me to realize that Trump fits my cultural diagnosis in that book in a way that is, dare I say it, almost creepy.

My argument in Why We Love Sociopaths is that the remarkable prevelance of sociopathic characters in 2000s television was a symptom of a broken cultural contract. With the decline of the Fordist order and the rise of neoliberalism, one long-standing narrative about social mobility and merit had been discarded without being replaced by a plausible alternative. This situation gave rise to a growing sense that the only reliable means to get ahead in the system is to cheat. Certainly we can read Trump 2.0, and especially the seeming public indifference to his flagrant violation of laws and constitutional structures, as an extreme outgrowth of that basic tendency.

I organized my account around three types of sociopaths, all of which seem in retrospect to capture the Trump phenomenon in some way. The first category was the Schemer, which I mainly associated with cartoon shows where the characters are attempting to get away with mischief for its own sake. My key example was Eric Cartman from South Park, the strangely charismatic and resourceful child who periodically comes close to taking over the United States and even the world. Though Trump obviously lacks Cartman’s discipline and focus, there is something of the childish schemer in Trump — though that element is less prevalent in the embittered end-state we are now witnessing.

The second was the Climber, who stops at nothing to climb the social ladder. My key examples here was Don Draper from Mad Men. Here the connection to Trump is admittedly more distant, since my analysis was focused on meritocrats of the Obama type, who I argue should not be counted on to challenge the basic terms of the system that enabled their rise. Yet I do start out with an analysis of reality television, which I present as a “dumbed-down” version of the same basic worldview we see in prestige dramas like Mad Men and The Wire, and so I want to claim partial credit due to Trump’s association with reality TV.

The final sociopathic archetype was the Enforcer, the lawman who breaks the law in order to save it. My key example here was Jack Bauer of 24, who murders and tortures his way to stopping terrorist attacks that only see seems to have the insight to predict. Trump himself has identified unambiguously with this category, in his infamous quote (attributed to Napoleon) claiming that it is impossible to violate the law in service of your country. Clearly he is counting on his fellow citizens to decide that it doesn’t matter if he follows the legal niceties as long as he gets things done — nor is there any way to deny that the system as constituted on January 19, 2024, was basically incapable of delivering any meaningful results in a way that would be legible to the public.

Not only does Trump fit, in some way, into all of these categories, but his appeal depends on his ability to pivot among them. His status as a Cartman-esque provocateur gives people license to dismiss his scarier or more nonsensical declarations as mere bluster; his reputation as a (sort of) self-made businessman is key to his appeal; and his promise to “get things done” by any means necessary both emboldens his supporters and cows his enemies into submission. You can’t hold all three of these images together simultaneously, but they often combine in a kind of one-two punch. Cartman Trump seems most useful for such strategies. For instance, the existence of Climber Trump allows people to use the Cartman Trump to dismiss his destructive economic plans as bluster, while the frightening ambitions of Jack Bauer Trump can be rendered more palatable by reference to Cartman Trump. But on the less jovial side, it is precisely the Climber Trump that renders him plausible to many as a Jack Bauer figure who won’t be beholden to political restraints.

While in my conclusion I do offer up the feeble hope that, in a broken system, we might all benefit from being more sociopathic — a counterintuitive soundbite that was for a time picked up by Slavoj Žižek in his public lectures — my overall assessment of this trend is negative. It does offer a diagnostic of our broken system, sometimes even (in the case of The Wire in particular) a remarkably insightful one, and I admit up front that I enjoyed many of these shows (including South Park and some reality TV).

But its dominance of the entertainment field was, I believed, socially corrosive, and I think events have proven me correct. Trump 2.0 is not just politics as entertainment, which is bad enough, but it’s politics as 2000s entertainment, it’s politics as designed by people who watched way too much South Park, 24, and reality TV. I’m not making this up. Literal Republicans say as much, about themselves. Ross Douthat wrote a famous column on the rise of “South Park Republicans,” motivated primarily by a brash anti-PC attitude rather than any positive ideology. Supreme Court Justice Scalia — supposedly “the smart one” — literally cited 24 in an opinion, and the current conservative supermajority are all intellectual heirs of Scalia. As for the influence of reality TV, Trump’s trajectory speaks for itself, and clearly neither J.D. Vance nor any of Trump 2.0’s luminaries are “here to make friends.”

Obviously sociopath TV is not the only cause of Trump — nor am I saying as much. I’m saying the trend itself arose as a symptom of social breakdown, which it then helped to exacerbate. The one thing my diagnosis excludes is social media, for which I can perhaps be forgiven since I was writing in 2012 (and the book was after all about TV). But I think that many of the attitudes inculcated by South Park, reality TV, and 24 — the reflexive anti-PC “provocativeness,” the endless zero-sum competition for “clout,” and the ambient menace of violent fantasies — have shaped the social media field as well.

I’m not sure how much credit I really deserve for this prediction, since the fact of having written the book didn’t help me to predict either Trump’s success in the primaries nor his Electoral College technicality. But then, like most sane people, I had not up till that point given Donald Trump — who was little more than a vapid media phenomenon — much thought. If I had, perhaps I would have seen how well the cultural trends I diagnosed in Sociopaths converged in him. The cost, though, is that I would have squandered some of those precious remaining years and months before I was forced to spend so much of my time and energy thinking about one of the most worthless human beings ever to live. I stand behind that trade-off, even if I had no way of knowing I was making it. And if it turns out that my little book about TV trends, properly contextualized, could have prevented Trump’s rise — all I can do is apologize.

On our flight home from Rome, we hit some turbulence — the borderline scary kind that turns your stomach and elicits the occasional gasp. I am a pretty seasoned traveller, so it would take much more than that to make me really fear for my safety. But my mind did wander: what if this was the end? And I thought about my improbably good life: a wonderful partner, a job that lets me genuinely contribute to society while challenging myself intellectually, a beautiful highrise apartment in a city we love, a lifestyle that accomodates frequent international travel…. It would be a shame not to get as much of this life as we could, but if a freak accident cuts it short, we have at least been living the life we want. My Esteemed Partner, happily engrossed in her movie, was apparently even less affected by the turbulence than me, but I imagined that if it really was a serious situation and she really was scared and upset, sharing thoughts along these lines with her might bring some comfort — maybe even some peace.

I sat with this line of thought for a few moments, savoring my sense of calm and equanimity. And then I thought: “Am I okay?” Is it normal for a person in the prime of life to be so comfortable with the thought of premature death? Is this a sign of wisdom and maturity, or of despair? Reflecting on this experience several times over the past few months, I have not been able to settle on an answer to that question. But what has become clear is that it was not about death as such, or at least not entirely: it was about Trump, the one force on earth that seems somehow even more inescapable than death.

Part of why I could imagine that flight home as the end is that we had joked, and maybe more than joked, about that trip being our last for the foreseeable future. The fears that motivated that speculation seemed distant and outlandish at the time — maybe My Esteeemed Partner, whose passport expires in a couple years, would not be able to renew it for some reason; maybe we would come to understand that we wouldn’t be guaranteed reentry if we left the country.

Now those fears seem somehow more realistic, not because of anything concrete that has happened in connection to the Trump administration’s policy on travel, but simply because everything feels like it’s up for grabs. I know that there’s always someone willing to claim they were the one voice in the wilderness that no one would listen to, but surely no one could have predicted how arbitrary and far-reaching the damage would be. Did Trump campaign on, for instance, suspending all medical research grants indefinitely? Did anyone really understand that he was going to hand the keys to Musk and completely ignore the Congressional appropriations process? Did anyone think the president would be openly musing about picking and choosing which government debts he regarded as binding?

And yet I still live my life, basically unaffected so far except for some mild anxiety about whether I will actually receive my tax refund. In fact, things are going well. I’ve been promoted, at long last, to associate professor, and though the Shimer faculty was not given the opportunity to gain tenure status, we have at least achieved some formal job security after many years of uncertainty. I’m enjoying my teaching this year — which is a good mix of familiar courses and challenging new material — and I’m happy to be serving my colleagues as chair of a major standing committee within faculty governance. My book Late Star Trek is coming out in a few short weeks, and I’m working toward establishing my scholarly expertise in the Qur’an.

In short, everything is coming together — but I’m not 100% sure there will even be college next year. Most are interpreting the assaults on federal research funding as attacks on higher ed more broadly, and the entire sector is deeply, deeply dependent on federal funding. Would they get rid of Pell Grants? That would be fatal for many institutions. Getting rid of federal student loans would be fatal for nearly all. I find myself in the bargaining stage as to whether North Central is likely to be affected by each step. I can even imagine scenarios, albeit highly improbable ones, where the loss of student loans is somehow survivable. But such speculation requires at least some stable background, some comprehensible context — and I will admit that I cannot process what a total repudiation of higher ed by the federal government does to the enterprise of higher ed, much less one particular school.

More radical thoughts present themselves as I go through the bargaining stage. What if I lose my job? I have savings that can last me a good long while, even leaving aside My Esteemed Partner’s income. And even if we both find ourselves out of work, we could probably survive for many years at a tolerable level of comfort. But that presupposes things like the continued viability of banks, or the continued value of money, or the stability of the power grid, or the safety of the water. John Quiggin introduced some nightmare fuel over at Crooked Timber: what if Trump announces the convertibility of US dollars with cryptocurrency? As recently as five weeks ago, I would have laughed off the idea. I’m not laughing now.

And it’s like this for everything. Will there be a flu shot next year? Will there be a Post Office next year? Will air travel remain viable? Will we be bogged down in a counterinsurgency in Canada? Will we join the Russian Federation? I threw the last one in there to test whether there’s a limit of what seems possible, and I find that I can’t dismiss even that — not after Trump’s insane lies about Zelinskyy and the origins of the war in Ukraine!

For a long time, I have been encouraging people to consider whether George W. Bush was even worse than Trump, but in a few short weeks Trump has demolished my case. Bush was an evil president using the power of the state to do evil things. Trump has effectively abolished the state. We do not have laws. We do not have a government. We certainly don’t have a Congress and we barely have courts. But in an important sense, we also don’t have a president. We have the irritable whims of two billionaires, handling domestic and foreign policy, respectively, and we have a bunch of psychos in charge of more detailed policy portfolios. The goal is not to change public policy, but to render public policy impossible. The goal is not to transform American society, but to destroy it completely, to destroy everything that makes it possible to call this great and terrible nation a human society.

Everything is up for grabs, because there is no limit to how capricious and spiteful and short-sighted the people ostensibly “in charge” will allow themselves to be. There is no possibility of any positive outcome until they are removed from office and replaced by literally anybody else — even J.D. Vance, who at least lacks Trump’s demonic charisma and who certainly does not inspire the same kind of fear and pathetic self-abasement and hence might get some pushback from someone.

Yet we all live our lives, day to day, as though we still live in a society, as though promises mean something, as though it’s possible to tell the future more than a week in advance, as though there’s anything we can be sure they won’t take from us. And as I think about that, I can sometimes even work myself into a state of calm resignation where I can contemplate the possibility of my life becoming much different and worse due to circumstances beyond my control and conclude that I will survive and find ways to affect the world positively and maybe even still experience moments of satisfaction and joy. But there are other times where I read the latest headline and spontaneously think: I don’t want to live in this world anymore.

When I’m in that mood, sometimes I think back to that turbulence. The strange thing about being in a plane crash, at least to my mind, is that you are going to be falling — for the rest of your life. The sick roller coaster sensation — at least this is how I imagine it, though it’s presumably much worse — is what you are going to be experiencing for the rest of your life. With one major exception, of course! But maybe one is accepting of that outcome in a different way in an endless moment of perpetual falling than in a moment of abstract contemplation. Food for thought, certainly!

Am I okay? I don’t even know what that would mean under these circumstances. And I — a white, straight, monogamously partnered, property-owning male with a savings account — am certainly the least of anyone’s worries. All due respect to those who are being more directly victimized! But what I’m sure we can all agree on, regardless of privilege level, is: This can’t go on forever. It can’t even go on for four years. And yet it might go on for four years and maybe even longer. For some people, it will last — perhaps already has lasted — the whole rest of their lives.

Agamben is best known for his critique of sovereign emergency powers and their tendency to reduce all legal subjects to a homo sacer-like state of absolute exposure to violence. But in more recent years, he has written more often about a seemingly opposite, but actually deeply correlative problem: the attempt to legislate every area of life. On the political level, this means collapsing legitimacy (our sense of what the law should be and do) into legality. Whatever the law is, must be legitimate, simply because it is the law — meaning that the idea of legitimacy as a critical standpoint over against the law is lost. One can see this on the level of constitutional law in the United States, where establishing the Founder’s intent, or simply repeating the way the existing institutions function, often suffices to establish the legitimacy of a particular outcome, at least in the minds of many liberals.

The same dynamic holds at an interpersonal level. On the one hand, we have increasingly lost any sense of the distinction between the legal and the ethical. I think here of the frequently given advice that after a car accident, one should not apologize, because it would mean admitting fault and could put you at a legal disadvantage. In a sane society, though, a person who believes themselves to have caused serious harm to another should apologize — and the person receiving the apology should not seize on that natural human reaction to maximize their legal advantage. On the other hand, people increasingly seem to believe that their interpersonal relationships can and indeed must be structured according to strict contractual terms. This comes up especially in sexual contexts, where one might expect legal niceties to be out of place. I look at the vogue for polyamory, for instance, and wonder at people’s apparent belief that anyone can “promise” that their feelings won’t be hurt. We could say something similar for people’s love of inscribing themselves into ever more precise identity categories that come complete with their own list of demands — or for other’s apparent belief that merely being asked to acknowledge the existence of unfamiliar gender or sexual identities is an unjust imposition to which they did not consent.

For me, the distinction between legality and legitimacy — or, more vividly, between law and justice — is pretty foundational. This is, blessedly, not because of Schmitt’s book by that title, but because it was foundational for Ted Jennings’ teaching when I was in grad school. This was when he was working on his two career-capping works on Paul, Reading Derrida / Thinking Paul and Outlaw Justice. As is well known, Paul’s mission in life was to vindicate the full inclusion of non-Jewish or Gentile believers in the Jesus movement — without requiring them to fulfill the Jewish law. And he argues for this position theologically by taking a fairly extreme position: “works of the law” cannot be necessary to save the Gentiles, because they have never actually saved anyone. What is salvific is actually faith or trust in God, apart from any external work. Although he would probably resist this description, in both books Jennings “secularizes” Paul’s argument by claiming that he is pointing to a universal dynamic in the relationship between law and justice. Law always points beyond itself, toward the principle of justice, and that principle means that law can always be called into question. When law claims to be fully self-sufficient, it betrays itself and becomes a tool of injustice.

In those days, there were many clear examples of what happens when law is separated from justice. George W. Bush was president, having taken office with a minority vote after a deeply questionable Supreme Court decision. No one had won the Electoral College without winning the popular vote in over a century, and the Supreme Court had never intervened in an election case in such an overtly partisan way. But the Electoral College was technically the law, and the Supreme Court is the last court of appeal, so he took office. After 9/11 — somewhat contrary to Agamben’s analysis — Bush did not claim sweeping emergency powers so much as fashion himself “legal tools” to wage his War on Terror. New legal categories were invented (“enemy combatant”), loopholes relating to territoriality were exploited (Guantanamo and CIA black sites), and the use of military force was authoritized even if war was not declared (in either Afghanistan or Iraq). Most chillingly, the White House set teams of lawyers to work elaborating a legal basis for the use of torture.

Basically all of this is still on the books. The Authorization to Use Military Force against al Qaeda and its allies is still the law of the land. Obama took advantage of Bush-era laws and norms to run a drone strike program that even claimed the right to execute American citizens without due process. Bush’s torture memos, even if never used by later administrations, were never tested in court, and certainly none of the architects of the torture regime were ever prosecuted. And the normalization of the Electoral College technicality gave us Trump in 2016 — and almost provided him with a perfectly legal means to seize a second term against the popular will in 2020.

Meanwhile, Republicans have been weaponizing laws and rules in many other ways. The anti-abortion movement has routinely passed state laws that were known to be unconstitutional, for the express purpose of giving them a route to the Supreme Court in the hopes of chipping away at and eventually overturning Roe v. Wade. In Congress, they have exploited every rule and loophole — from the abuse of the fillibuster to McConnell’s refusal to even consider Obama’s last Supreme Court nominee. Less discussed have been their efforts to ratchet the balance of power in the House permanently to the right. By means of the Hastert Rule (named after a convicted child molestor, by the way), which mandates that no legislation can come to the floor unless it has a support of the majority of Republicans, laws that would have enjoyed majority support have been obstructed even more efficiently than with the Senate fillibuster.

Meanwhile, professing the sanctity of laws and norms, Democrats refuse to change the rules to take away Republicans’ illegitimate advantage — because they have no conceptual basis for calling it illegitimate. The rules are the rules, and changing them would be cheating. That goes even for a stolen Supreme Court, whose Democratic members insist must be respected even as it undoes all their priorities with a gleeful disdain for precedent or even normal legal procedure — many of the biggest recent decisions should have been dismissed because the plaintiff lacked standing. But again, the rules are the rules, and all Democrats can do is grin and bear it.

We may be seeming to enter a new phase with the total brazen lawlessness of Trump 2.0. But I think it is, instead, the natural next step in the dialectic. Law shorn of legitimacy is already a kind of force, an inert brute fact — and so it should not surprise us that it eventually gives way to overt force. When law that has become nothing but a tissue of arbitrary technicalities, is it surprising that someone would eventually treat the concept of law itself as one huge annoying technicality? Meanwhile it is hard to imagine popular passions being inflamed by the call to vindicate the claims of Congress, which has systematically rendered itself incapable of passing routine legislation with majority support, or of the Courts, which have increasingly revealed themselves to be the servants of presidential power in any case. Nor is it any wonder that low-information normies approve of Trump’s actions, because the dysfunction of the system has created pent-up demand for someone to finally do something — without all the infighting and excuses.

The fact that what is being done is purely destructive, that we are losing things we may never get back, has not yet become clear. And when it does, we will need leaders who can speak to the level of justice and legitimacy rather than law and norm and procedure — leaders who can say, straightforwardly, that Trump shouldn’t do what he’s doing because it’s pointlessly cruel and that Trump doesn’t have a mandate to do what he’s doing because he’s a liar. When that moment comes, though, I fear that we will instead get the same mealy-mouthed losers who could do nothing but mumble about a “democracy” that means you can only vote for one party for the rest of your life and you should never actually expect to get anything out of it. We should want a return to law, a return to procedures and norms recognized by all political actors — but only on just and legitimate terms. Perhaps that can occur within the boundaries of the existing constitution, but a return to the status quo ante of 2024 is not and cannot be the answer. Until people of good will come to understand this, there will never be hope.

Kamala Harris’s closing pitch to the American people was to highlight the threat to democracy represented by Donald Trump. I share that sense of threat — lying about a stolen election and fomenting an insurrection to disrupt its certification are certainly not the marks of someone with a deep and abiding respect for democratic norms. And yet I also understand why that pitch has fallen flat, even among people who acknowledge the 2020 election result and disapprove of the January 6 attacks. After explaining why I find the mainstream liberal rhetoric on this position so unconvincing, I will discuss the more profound sense in which Trump and his movement represent a threat to the possibility of a more meaningful democratic culture emerging in the US, then conclude with some practical tips you can try at home.

1. A Critique of the “Threat to Democracy” Rhetoric

On the one hand, America has always had a tenuous grasp on democratic norms. Disputes over voting procedure and eligibility have always been part of the normal range of political contestation; gerrymandering has been “a thing” since the founding of the Republic; state and local elections are routinely scheduled strategically to decrease turnout and thus accountability; money plays such a huge role in election races that people seem to regard donation as almost more important than voting itself; the Senate is insanely malapportioned and has adopted even more anti-democratic rules on top of that; the two-party system artificially narrows the range of political options in a self-reinforcing way; the separate election of two houses of Congress and the Presidency all but guarantees divided government and thus gridlock most of the time, preventing the implementation of any coherent political program; and of course the Electoral College has allowed the loser to win twice in our young century, to the point where the popular vote has basically disappeared from public discourse. There simply is not a robust culture of democracy in the US. No rational American adult expects their vote to lead directly to any specified outcome. We vote mainly to try to prevent the worst, but there is no sense in which the people at large have a hand in setting the political agenda.

Within that context, the Democrats have done virtually nothing to create the conditions for more authentic democracy. No voting rights legislation was passed or even seriously taken up under Biden — in part because Senate Democrats can’t (or simply don’t want to) discipline their own party even on the purely procedural question of the fillibuster rule. Al Gore conceded to his virtually unprecedented 2000 Electoral College upset almost immediately and Democrats since have done nothing to call into question the institution that has effectively stolen two elections from them, both with disastrous consequences. Indeed, they seem to be “leaning in,” running narrowly focused campaigns on swing states while making no effort in Republican-leaning states. Nor was there any attempt to counteract the extremely unpopular Dobbs decision — in part because they concede in advance that the Supreme Court would simply strike it down again.

And simply at the level of rhetoric, it cannot be the case that the only way to defend authentic democracy is to vote for one and only one party forever and ever amen. It cannot be the case that voters are not allowed to register their dissatisfaction with the omnishambles of the Biden administration because the only other option the system allows is illegitimate and unacceptable — a claim that the Democrats don’t seem to even believe themselves, since Kamala Harris called to “congratulate” Trump on his victory, just as Obama cheerfully agreed to meet with him before handing over the keys and Hillary attended his inauguration.

Certainly Trump is going to be more supportive of restricting voting rights than the typical Republican, and he is going to empower and embolden others on the state level to take more repressive actions. Republicans will likely further lock down their veto points and exploit all avaliable leverage to thwart the popular will — above all on the question of abortion. He may even concoct a rationale to run for a third term and find his hand-picked Supreme Court willing to legitimize it. But the notion that he is somehow going to abolish elections or appoint himself dictator for life strains credulity. And again, if Democrats really believe that, then they should be willing to take much more radical action to prevent him from taking power than re-running Hillary’s campaign with a slightly more charismatic and likeable candidate. Either the Democrats don’t really believe Trump is a burgeoning dictator or they are cowards and fools of almost unimaginable dimensions. (Or both!)

2. A Broader Concept of Democracy Than “People Periodically Vote”

There is more to democracy than just voting. First, the people who propose to rule themselves must have some sense of shared identity, embodied in shared practices and institutions. Second, the community must be able to hold itself and its representatives accountable with reference to some kind of reality principle — some shared empirical basis for judging the success or failure of policies and projects. In the narrow sense of “people voting,” Tuesday’s absolutely disastrous and devastating election result was undeniably democratic. Yet the other two conditions are obviously lacking.

In terms of the first condition, Trump and the Republicans have set themselves up as the sole arbiters of who really “counts” as American, and they have inculcated an attitude of paranoia and distrust in their supporters through false accusations of voter fraud. More broadly, they clearly have no investment in American political institutions except insofar as they can be weaponized to give them more power, nor do they value public goods such as public schools, public libraries, public health regulations, etc., etc. And this connects up with the second condition. For example, the result of the 2020 presidential election is an undeniable, brute empirical fact — yet a strong pluarlity of our fellow citizens believe the obviously self-serving lies of a life-long scam artist over the unanimous testimony of election officials and judges from all 50 states and both parties. And that is only the most extreme instance of an attitude that rejects factual claims from experts precisely because they are made by experts.

What unites both of these two anti-democratic tendencies is their rejection of the public in favor of the private. And to that extent, Trumpian populism is a radicalization of the neoliberal ethos. In the classical era of neoliberalism, from roughly 1991 to 2016, the general consensus was that the purpose of public institutions was to set the rules of the game of market competition and to provide a range of public goods — such as basic research, official statistics, and the conditions for turning young human beings into productive human capital — that market actors had no incentive to reliably provide. Already, the value of public goods and public knowledge was implicitly called into question. They were not ends in themselves, but means to economic growth. Indeed, they were often even viewed as necessary evils, and as many such public duties were entrusted to private profit-seeking entities as possible.

In our new populist moment, by contrast, even this notion of the public as the necessary handmaiden of private accumulation has been delegitimized. Public schools don’t exist to induct students into a shared secular democratic culture, for instance, but are treated as hired hands to provide parents with babysitting services and to inculcate only those values the parents favor. Public libraries are not treated as repositories of certified knowledge, but as reflections of whatever arbitrary values or beliefs the surrounding community happens to have. And public office is increasingly treated as a private possession — above all by Trump, who jokes that he should get a “do-over” because he faced too much opposition and scrutiny to fully enjoy his first term and who muses that perhaps he should not have agreed to leave office in January 2021 after all.

This preference for private power over against public goods goes hand-in-hand with the racism, sexism, xenophobia, and other oppressive views characteristic of the radical right. The unfettered exercise of private power will inevitably mean the reassertion of traditional forms of dominance in private life — the superiority of the man over his wife, the ownership of children by their parents, the various hierarchies of race, etc., etc. In reality, the neoliberal order was fully compatible with such hierarchies, which festered and worsened even as exceptional individuals from disadvantaged groups enjoyed spectacular success. But even that token representation was experienced as a humiliation by many of our fellow citizens — above all Trump himself, who first stormed onto the political scene to spread lies meant to delegitimize our first Black president and who arguably chose to run for president specifically because Obama mocked him in his remarks at the Presidential Correspondents’ Dinner.

Reaganite deregulation was ostensibly meant to unleash wealth creation. Trumpian deconstruction of the administrative state is meant to make sure that there’s no one who can tell the boss what to do — no one to give workers or customers or anyone else any leverage against the hierarchy of private domination. Something similar is going on with the destruction of any public consensus on a shared reality through algorithmic manipulation. Where before one might decry wasting money on “useless knowledge,” now the goal is to make sure no genuine learning or understanding occurs at all — by feeding everyone a customized stream of bullshit that targets their own personal weaknesses and insecurities, a tendency that LLM-generated text and images will surely only amplify.

On both these points, the Democrats are again poor messengers, because they don’t genuinely believe in public goods or the disinterested pursuit of knowledge. They remain neoliberal through and through, meaning that they can’t get past arguing that quality public schools actually help economic growth or that we need to learn stuff because it’s a knowledge economy — or whatever the fashionable corporate bullshit happens to be today. “Greening the economy will create jobs and help us compete against China!” Seriously: shut the fuck up.

3. It’s the Capitalism, Stupid!

We can fight these tendencies and create more livable conditions. People have done so in the past, to varying degrees of success. But all of these tendencies are intrinsic to capitalism. We may well be entering a new phase that will make us nostalgic for neoliberalism — a phase centered more on establishing economic autarky and zero-sum competitions between nations — but it’s still going to be capitalism, which means that it’s still going to be exploitative, racist, endlessly hungry from free reproductive labor, etc., etc. We can’t solve those problems in the long run with solutions that are fundamentally parasitical on capitalist production, such as the welfare state or universal basic income, even if they are financed through the vulgar online MMT magical thinking of “helicopter money.”

We need to figure out ways of organizing our communities and our values and our livelihoods in non-capitalist ways. That has been more or less off the table for a generation, in large part because the biggest large-scale experiment with doing that spectacularly collapsed and everyone decided that the system jerry-rigged between two world wars in a peasant society was the only possible way you could do anything other than capitalism. We need to stop letting our rejection of a society that is dead and gone (and that ever fewer people still alive even directly experienced) limit our imagination.

And we need to get the fuck off of social media as soon as possible. I know I am late to this game, having held out at Twitter way too long and then tried to make Bluesky work. The beginning of the end for me was a huge blow-up around a Financial Times column that averred that Bluesky was a liberal bubble, prompting much indignation. After I gave up actively contributing, I have occasionally taken a peek in there and — good grief, it is absolutely absurd. It’s like the liberal version of when we used to make fun of Fox News for suddenly lurching to Hillary Clinton’s ancient scandals while Trump’s trials were going on. The immense levels of cope, verging on the conspiratorial (one pollster in Iowa has figured out it’s going to be a Harris landslide), made me feel like I was on another planet.

We all need to read more — really read. We can’t keep getting our news in two-sentence bursts or trying to have serious discussions with decontextualized fragments. We need to keep some kind of intellectual culture alive, because public schools are dying and universities no longer care about such matters. We need to keep ahold of reality. Like Matthew Ellis — whose excellent post today I have had in the back of my mind as I wrote this — I would encourage you to read the financial press. I subscribe to the Financial Times currently, and find it refreshingly factual (complete with non-tendentious headlines, for my Bluesky bros!). I’ve subscribed to Bloomsburg Businessweek in the past and found it excellent. You would be unimaginably better informed if you just read one of those regularly and subscribed to the New Left Review than you will ever be from scrolling on social media.

We are in a really bad situation. I don’t know how to make it better, but I do know we need to stop making ourselves actively stupider.