To be sure, the current global crisis derives from other factors than the sudden transformation of the United States from a relatively predictable state with liberal democratic tendencies to one tipping toward chaos and authoritarianism simultaneously.
But developments there function like laboratory experiments designed to test the limits of the hard right sensus communis.
I’ll begin with two key points.
First, if I assert that the current situation represents a change from the liberal democratic consensus of the postwar decades, that doesn’t mean that I’m claiming that the reality of that consensus and its self-image were the same. It was aspirational at best.
Nevertheless, something has clearly changed. The following notes are part of a continuing project of parsing exactly what that is.
Second, while I frequently use the term “Trumpism,” I don’t mean to imply that there is a coherent or even consistent theory underpinning the actions of President Trump or those working within his political orbit.
Donald Trump is not Adolf Hitler or any other authoritarian figure of the past, although he shares features with many of them. The most important of these is the political maxim sic volo, sic jubeo.
Authoritarians of all political colourations hold that it is their right to decide the truth and that their decisions should not be constrained by prior choices made by others or even ones made by them. The corollary is that what happens today always aligns with what was asserted yesterday.
These convictions help explain why contemporary authoritarian leaders promote chaos, from Trump to Jair Bolsonaro, Javier Milei, Rodrigo Duterte, and Nayib Bukele. This might seem paradoxical due to the fascination with order that they so often communicate. But chaos is a feature rather than a bug.
This approach has long roots in the history of twentieth-century authoritarianism. One obvious example is the role of the Sturmabteilung (SA) during the Weimar Republic. Its purpose was twofold. The physical suppression of political opponents was primary. But the spectacle of armed goons doing battle in the streets also created an atmosphere of chaos that made middle-class voters more readily accept the need for a strong hand like Hitler’s on the tiller.
Chaos also confuses one’s enemies. In his first term, President Trump discovered that his will could be thwarted by a wide range of entrenched institutional powers, from the career civil service to educational institutions to anyone who possessed factual knowledge, such as scientists.
Trump began his second government by executing a full-scale purge of these hindrances, unleashing Elon Musk’s DOGE operation on government agencies and cracking down on educational and scientific institutions under the sign of a war against wokeness.
These moves have either synergised with, or met no resistance from, the new-right version of common sense now abroad in the land. Nourished by a toxic stew of marginal narratives and conspiracy theories cooked up in an extremist media ecology from which critical scrutiny has been systematically eliminated, a significant segment of the American public welcomes this gutting of institutions.
This process has weaponised a grossly exaggerated account of the impact of “wokeness” despite a systematic failure to define that term. Regardless of the term’s vagueness, it has proved a highly effective means of blaming an amorphous elitism for the nation’s institutions failing to address the perceived crisis of lower- and middle-class whites.
The Democratic Party has abetted this dynamic. To the extent that conditions for working and middle-class whites, particularly men, have changed, it is partly the result of efforts to redress the exclusion of non-whites and women from the full measure of rights and opportunities offered, at least aspirationally, by liberal capitalism.
Changes in the structure of the world economy and the rise of technology—automation but also shifts in the structure and value of less-skilled labour—have also played a part. What hasn’t changed is the Democrats’ unwillingness to countenance systematic change, specifically regarding the distribution of wealth.
Both the Democrats and the Republicans remain beholden to large donors. Because the Republicans have found significant reservoirs of capital further to the right, Democrats have felt compelled to shift their attention in that direction. Large pools of capital are not found further to the left. But parties with strong middle-class bases also like to tack toward the right in moments of crisis. There lies safety, security, and no inconvenient demands to take money from those who have a lot to give to those who have less.
The result is that the Democrats have signally failed, over the last three decades, to address meaningfully the failure of the world economy to generate outcomes for lower and middle-class whites on a par with those that existed, at least in memory, during the 1950s and 60s.
Donald Trump has set out his stall on change: remaking the facts for people who have long grown tired of being told by educated elites what the facts are and why the lack of opportunities that their fathers and grandfathers enjoyed is simply how it is.
His dalliance with tariffs is an example of this. In the face of the “that’s just how it is” story, Trump has presented a narrative of America as the wronged party and of prosperity stolen by unscrupulous foreigners, along with grasping illegals at home.
Attempts to point out that tariffs are a tax on domestic purchasers or that they invariably result in rising consumer prices have been blithely waved aside. So have been the eminently predictable shocks to equity prices, with Trump asserting that Americans would have to feel “some pain” before the unruly foreigners could be forced to relent.
Changes to the structure of the tariffs, specifically cutouts for items from China that major US corporate interests couldn’t live without, have been woven seamlessly into the narrative.
Recently, however, the Trump Administration has been forced to change course. Shifts in the equities market are one thing. They could provide opportunities for bargain hunting for those with enough money, not to mention timely information about upcoming policy changes. But a 50+ basis point shift in the return on bonds, as happened two weeks ago, is another matter entirely.
Now the talk in Washington is of negotiations with China. After describing the United States’ biggest economic rival in terms recalling the serpent from Genesis only weeks ago, President Trump is now promising movement in the negotiations if only the Chinese will be nice to him.
Why Beijing—or anyone on the receiving end of the treatment that Trump’s government has been doling out—would take such a course is anyone’s guess. But there’s no doubt that a hard boundary has been reached.
These chaotic involutions have their purpose.
President Trump’s thinking is shaped by a small number of idées fixes: principally self-aggrandisement and white victimhood. He is surrounded by a group of marginal thinkers, each with a transformative agenda.
What Trumpism amounts to is a process of letting these people tinker with institutions, with the knowledge that it’s possible to fall back on the old “father knows best” narrative if they need to be reined in.
This nature of this process is important, and not merely in the United States. Trumpism is hashing out the rough draft of a playbook that figures on the far right throughout the developed world will want to employ when they get into power.
It is not difficult to imagine similar outcomes from an Alternative für Deutschland-led government in Germany, a Reform UK-led government in Britain, or an Rassemblement National-led government in France.
The sudden instability in national and international institutions triggered by Donald Trump—which from the right looks like an opportunity—has created a political ecology in which similar radicalism can flower.
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Photograph courtesy of Cheryl Grayum. Published under a Creative Commons license.
