Look, prior to Trump the US was experiencing a sociopathic death spiral in our professional classes, something well documented by both social science research and major population surveys. US institutions were beyond dead at this point, they were undead zombie predators. It was highly predictable (and predicted!) that voters would turn to strongmen to protect them from predatory elites, yet to this day no serious talk of what institutional reforms are needed to prevent sociopathic capture of institutions has happened.
The postwar American state has been collapsing in slow motion ever since the oil shock of the 70s. Before the 70s Western governments consistently grew both capital to worker ratios and income simultaneously with the cooperation (if sometimed grudging) of the managerial class.
Pretty much all the tools the government used to do this were abolished in either the late 70s, late 90s or under Barack Obama of all people. State capacity was crippled long before Trump came on the scene. There is something wrong if the only policy lever a government has to drive growth is mass immigration.
This is Tim writing from Rachel's account. She asked me to share my observations.
When we were in college in the early 2000s the million-dollar question circulating in the philosophy/history/theology circles was: "Post-modern relativism ending; what comes next?" I think we are seeing what comes next in what you have identified as "re-enchantment."
I'm not familiar with the Weber you were citing, but it seems that his idea of disenchantment is well-attested in the likes of Nietzsche, T.S. Eliot, Yeats, and any number of thinkers who bewailed the desolation of industrialization and the Lost Generation of WWI. The roots of the disenchantment go to the Enlightenment and beyond, but the bitter fruits really only became evident in the 20th century.
You are on to something when you say that Trump is benefiting from a "longing for re-enchantment." The examples you give of the religious right, nerd reich, rejection of medicine for magic, and alternative facts are all apropos of the negative shadow side of re-enchantment. These indicate a grasping at power through a search for meaning. There is a positive side, however.
Re-enchantment is not merely a rejection of rationality. In the Christian circles where I live and work there is much hope in an apparent upturn of people actually finding meaning and not just searching for it. They are finding it outside themselves and not merely imposing it on themselves the way the disenchanted world seemed to require it.
Your article is only the latest place that I have encountered re-enchantment as an observation of what's going on in the world. And yours is the only place I have seen focus on the negative results of it. I first felt it when I read the works of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien in their task of providing new myths for the contemporary west. I first heard the word circulated as a kind of underground in-joke in Eastern Orthodox and Traditional Catholic podcasts. It was then given fuller exposition through the public work of people like Jordan Peterson, Jonathan Pageau, and Bishop Robert Barron. And the most comprehensive treatment of it I've seen, including actual statistical data, is in the work of Justin Brierley (https://justinbrierley.com/the-surprising-rebirth-of-belief-in-god).
All that to say... I think you are right in identifying what unifies the weird Trump coalition. Re-enchantment tends away from the legal-rational legitimacy. Trump is doing a lot of damage. And there is a bigger picture that includes some hope.
To answer your final few questions regarding whether democracy has a chance, I just point to Plato in the Republic where he shows democracy as the last step on the road to tyranny. It's a good thing that government doesn't determine our final destiny.
The US may well be on the way to a self-inflicted economic disaster led by a charismatic charlatan and fueled by an enchantment with unregulated capitalism. A large number of Americans have lost their belief in a system that has cost them their dignity and their hope for the future, making them vulnerable to the charm of the charlatan. In the rubble of that disaster it might be possible, using the productive potential of capitalism, to rebuild a system that provides economic security for all Americans. But my fear is that the coming crisis will be either too mild to unrig the current economic system, or too serious to permit a rebuild. Bureaucracy is an epithet to many of our citizens, but it is absolutely essential to a stable economic or political order. It will be necessary to rebuild the bureaucracies that the current regime is so carelessly and willfully dismantling if we are to enjoy the blessings of the liberty our ancestors bequeathed to us at the cost of their blood, toil, tears, and treasure. My fear is that we are headed back to the 15th century, but with better technology.
Could Weber have an imagined a Trump-like character? Mmm, maybe yes, to the pathological lying, the bombast and the delusional persecution complex, for they aptly harness the fascist’s favorite thing - an ignorant propagandized voter. But, no, the oval occupier’s incompetence, incoherence, the clown-like, painted cartoon villain face, no. The youngsters recoil at the glaring ineptitude and amateurish side show of political theater emanating from this imbecile and his thugs, the lie spew, the intransigence, the faltering economy, the false promises, the iterative reoccurring blame fixing. The daily dripping horror show will be his and Project 2025’s undoing, I pray.
Old and young, right and left, the people must continue standing up, must stand up more, louder. The press must continue shining their klieg light. We must find the rising voice of next leader, the loud, bold, factual, charismatic, articulate force.
I’m late to this discussion, which is fascinating. I have no clear idea now of how the Trump debacle will end but I sense that it is a reactionary movement at its core, that is attempting to drag us back to a time of tariffs, no income tax, Manifest Destiny to acquire countries like Canada and Greenland — and a traditionalist form of Christianity and unremitting if empty flag waving. People are afraid. Of “post-modernity”, of the implosion of the nuclear family and the extension of family to new forms with IVF, gays and lesbians and trans people having children, “chosen” families of friends, and an encroaching secular society that is nonetheless filled with pagan elements like Burning Man and weird art and — new hybrids of religious ritual and thinking — the “spiritual”. So there is this THING, this reactionary movement run on resentment and fear. Yes, there’s also the rust belt and the hallowing out of American manufacturing, and the way people often have to work two or three jobs just to pay the rent. Social media has had an effect — fueling fears and misinformation — encouraging virtual tribalism. But how will it end? Reactionary movements don’t win in the long haul. You can’t force people to go back to 1919, 1930 or — the Middle Ages. These folks are living in their imagining of an earlier, better time. The reality was far different. They don’t actually want to give up their iPhones.
I predict that in time, there will be a reckoning and most people will not stand by MAGA’s fantasies. It may be violent and there may be a form of civil war. But I also believe we will come out of this, because people don’t really want to go back. They can’t anyway. There will be damage, but somehow we will get it together — changed — but we will continue. Now what the “change” will be, I’m not sure. But it won’t be a forced and fake return to an earlier idealized time… I hope it will be a better time than what led to this. But honestly, I don’t think I can describe it yet…
And I must add, I hope that our constitution is intact. It may be… but there may be something added to strengthen the guardrails so that a strong man doesn’t appear again and take power. It is shocking how Trump has seized control of institutions… or nearly seized control. We are in a battle and we are being tested. I think we will come out of it but — there will likely be violence and — this won’t be easy.
Think what they are doing right now, every day, below the surface, to stop free and fair elections. It will be here well before midterms. They are rigging everything to favor authoritarian fascist rule.
Laws, policies, regs must be reimagined, rewritten, tightened up and reinforced, so as to prevent any toxic, lie-spewing pretender ever again to grab the reins of American power. This, if good, fair honest, informed masses of Americans are smart enough and lucky enough to retake power from current cadre of fascist liars.
Where is Jay? He posted a link to a great lecture on Nietzsche back in October - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JuVFfgTkwn0 - all about the lack of "meaning-conferring narratives" in liberal-democratic materialism. It's pretty much the dis/re-enchantment story all over.
Thank you, Claire, for an excellent framing of our dilemma. "The longing for re-enchantment" hits the nail on the head. Many of the members of the Trump cult see him as either godlike or blessed by God. Trump's escape from assassination by a matter of inches feeds into this, and Trump has played the Divine Intervention card to the hilt.
Another dimension of the problem, implied but not made explicit in your analysis, is the grip of tribalism on our political perceptions, on both sides of the left-right divide. After all, millions of year of human social evolution took place in tribes--if you were not a "team player" you were less likely to find and keep a mate to pass on your genes. Thus biologically most of us are wired for tribalism: it is the default social arrangement. In times of uncertainty people tend to revert to the comfort of tribalism.
And boy do we have uncertainty! The disruptions of the digital age intensify uncertainty across the political spectrum. Social media with their abundant "rabbit holes" and our fractured media landscape in general facilitate the renewal of tribalism. Wherever we are going politically has to accommodate the biases of tribalism, even as they rip apart the norms of The Enlightenment upon which the American political system has been based. Social relations WITHIN individual tribes consisting of less than a few hundred individuals tend to be democratic, but democracy is fragile in a state comprising multiple tribes. That's especially when one major tribe rejects the principle that diversity makes for strength; for example, the war on DEI flows from this rejection, and that provokes a hostile reaction from those who embrace DEI, hardening the existing tribal lines even more. Just watch Rachel Maddow for one hour and sense the lines of tribalism brighten, and hopes for democracy across the country darken.
I don't see a lasting resolution that does not liberate the tribes from the bonds of a cohesive "United" States. The 21st Century is showing us they are now incompatible. One group--a "Blue" group committed to the Weberian "legal-rational" model--would have to find a way to separate itself from a" Red" group, currently dominated by the "charismatic" figure of Donald Trump, that will segue upon his death into traditional authoritarianism, even dictatorship. HOW this could be accomplished--"Blue" states vs "Red: states?-- is not easily pictured, but if it doesn't we're likely to slide into despotism, tying the two tribes together by force. (Obviously this is an oversimplification: there are more than two tribes, but there's a possibility for coalitions of tribes to form into supertribes.)
BTW, thank you for the "Nerd Reich." That's a delicious coinage, wherever it came from. It's good to find something to laugh at in this period of dread.
Recently Claire and I posted here about political psychologist Karen Stenner, who studies those with what she calls the authoritarian disposition, an enduring and universal personality type, about a third of any population (think the MAGA third) . She says, "Democracy is most secure, and tolerance is maximized, when we design systems to accommodate how people actually are. Because some people will never live comfortably in a modern liberal democracy" (https://www.karenstenner.com). Her recommendation for accommodating how this third of Americans actually are is helping them, our fellow citizens, to be their best selves. See the Where Do We Go From Here? section of “Magazine: Essay – Authoritarianism (https://hopenothate.org.uk/2020/11/01/authoritarianism/) for what that involves.
I think she is not saying that we are incompatible, but rather that they are who they are and we can co-exist if we who value and are comfortable with our "legal-rational" liberal democracy and our Constitution accommodate them. For me, that's the way forward, and it can be done IF the right political leadership emerges.
The key, of course, is, as you say, if the right political leadership emerges. Unfortunately our ossified binary political party system tends to make that more difficult. The Founders understood that when they at first eschewed ‘factionalism’ then, being all too human, went right ahead and initiated it anyway. My sense of irony is always tickled by the formal name of Jefferson’s mob, the Democratic Republicans.
In a recent interview with Jon Stewart, the historian Jon Meacham suggested that the Founders would have been surprised that the experiment they launched has lasted as long as it has.
I have heard other historians say the same. Joseph Ellis says they’d be surprised we still had the Electoral College. The hatred between Adams and Jefferson is just stunning, after their close, essential collaboration on the Declaration.
Ossified is certainly fair, especially the Dems. The Rs are just corrupted. What do you think of the idea that leaders emerge in times of crisis? Lincoln being an example.
Adams and Jefferson - Remember that in their later years their correspondence was anything but hate-filled as they discussed what was becoming of the nation they had done so much to create. Neither one was entirely happy with the direction in which they saw it going. In a way, I’ve always thought of them as the opposite poles of a debate we are still having, the balance between the value of centralized power and the needs of the community on the one hand and the need for individual rights and freedom on the other - indeed, the most ancient and enduring debate humanity has been having ever since ’the kingship descended from Heaven’ in ancient Sumer.
Electoral College - which of course does not function in the way it was designed and intended, due almost entirely to its weaponization by the two political parties - most especially the Republicans. That’s what I meant by my characterization of our binary system - that all too often it forces so many of us into an ‘us and them’ mode which places party loyalty above all else - too often at the expense of the country’s best interests.
The possibility of the Great Man theory in history - the prime example being WWII when a collection of charismatic leaders around the world first catapulted us into the maelstrom and then got us out of it by the skin of our teeth. Did it take a Hitler and a Mussolini to make a Churchill, a Roosevelt, or a Stalin (and before you question that last choice, remember that it was Stalinist Russia that broke the back of the Wehrmacht.)? I don’t know. How does one calculate if any given leader who never faced a crisis and is not well remembered might have become world-historical if he or she had faced one. Without the Revolution, who would remember Washington? What would Kamala Harris have made of the presidency? How would JFK be remembered without those 13 October days, and Dallas?
Is it the crisis who meets the man/woman or the man/woman who meets the crisis? Perhaps Trumpism will give us the answer. Indeed, I’ve found myself thinking of late that we needed Trumpism, just as we once needed the Civil War. Maybe Jefferson was right about the regular need for patriot blood or its political equivalent, but just not every 20 years.
1. I do know about their final years. They were old men no longer full of piss and vinegar. And because of that, they no longer had any influence on the national discourse. Further, it was Adams who initiated their final correspondence. That story would make for a great PBS feature to educate Americans about our bi-furcated founding that has endured throughout our history.
2. Agree about the enduring nature of their debate. The anti-Federalists feared centralized power. They feared the educated elites. Isn't that exactly what MAGA fears?
3. Can you explain what you mean by this: "The Electoral College does not function in the way it was designed"?
4. I don't think Jefferson was right about the need for revolution every 20 years if we look at our history. The system that the Framers designed did NOT require such blood until the scourge of slavery threatened Free Soil.
3. Since there were no formal political parties at the time, there could not have been ‘faithful’ or ‘unfaithful’ electors. They were intended to be independent, able to make their own choices.
2. I don’t think the anti-Federalists can legitimately be compared to MAGA. They certainly feared the prospect of a centralized power, but their fear was not about elites but rather about what they saw as the monarchical tendencies of the Federalists (which in Hamilton’s case was not entirely unjustified) but MAGA, despite its protests to the contrary is all about centralized power. Otherwise they would never have backed Trump, who is all about centralized power. That is one of main internal contradictions of MAGA. They are trying to back two horses galloping in two opposite directions. And they are starting to see that as Trump 2.0 diverges from their overly rosy memories of Trump 1.0.
4. Jefferson wasn’t right, most clearly demonstrated in his continued backing of the French Revolution even when it descended into bloody chaos. He actually thought the whole show should be renewed every now and again, with the past thrown out. In terms of government, he was too revolutionary for his own good. At the same time, as President, he often contradicted his own beliefs, tending toward centralized decision making.
1. I think it is hardly fair to say that Adams and Jefferson had no influence as they aged, although what they did have was certainly indirect at best. What we need to remember is the radical nature of our founding, and that they, as ‘present at the creation’ were in a very good position to understand what their original design was evolving into and what mistakes they might have made. And neither of them was happy about it.
Our central problem, as I see it, is that as human beings we are ourselves an internal contradiction, and so it is hardly strange that our governments, even the best of them, are also such.
Not many clear scenarios on my side. Only a comment on legitimacy: from all characteristic of western governance, democracy is the most underlined but not the most important. First, the people cannot rule and does not rule: at most we can ask “the consent of the governed”. A large Number of people cannot actively rule.
Too much weigth is put on the extremely small popular input (R or D every 4 years) in this system. We need to legitimate our real structures of governance: the judiciary, the civil service, the public opinion… the large machinery of freedom and prosperity derives all its legitimacy from a ritual that happens once in each 4 years. A filmsy foundation for such a large structure…
To follow up on my previous comment that "One thing that happens as a supposedly rational system gets too unaccountable – or merely too difficult for any but expert users to navigate – is that rules stop feeling predictable, and we feel like we're losing control", we may describe this unaccountability as dehumanizing. Nonetheless, we're still using systems designed by humans for humans.
The problem isn't that human involvement is absent (even AI cribs from Nabokov to call itself "a democracy of ghosts", ghosts of the humans whose decisions and work AI ingests for data: https://x.com/sama/status/1899535387435086115 ) but that human involvement has become unaccountable, a ghost, intangible to us. And we may feel, in turn, that we're ghosts to it, that we're beings a system is no longer designed to register. (Unless and until, that is, we're blessed with the bottom-up charisma of coming to DOGE's attention because our Xeet was reXeeted until Musk deigned to take an interest – more on that at the end.)
For example, the supermarket nearest me encourages self-checkout. The self-checkout kiosks have the usual self-checkout scales for loss prevention, and these scales have a weight limit, beyond which self-checkout crashes and the whole transaction is voided. A kiosk obviously must record weight *somewhere* in its system in order to crash when its weight limit is exceeded, but this information is invisible to the user. The weight limit isn't posted. We don't see a readout of the weight we've already got on the scale. There's no alert that a customer is approaching the weight limit and likely to void the transaction with the weight of another item. The choice to deny the human user any of this information was a *human* choice.
It may be an understandable human choice. As average household size shrinks, the people likely to buy in quantities likely to exceed the weight limit may be too few to matter. But for those with heavier grocery hauls, this also turns each self-checkout kiosk into a little god we must make our best guess to appease should we dare approach it. The kiosk knows with greater certainty than we do how close we are to its weight limit, but doesn't tell us, only smites us with a voided transaction should we "sin" against it.
The kiosks become little gods because they use information which has been curated – by humans – to exclude human-readable information important to some of the humans using it.
I can gain the expertise, or at least proficiency, to disenchant *some* of the godlets I encounter, reducing them to mere tools of reasoning that I can master – but who has the time to become proficient (much less expert) in *all* of them? Most user interfaces must remain, to my limited self, altars to petty, inscrutable gods, where I offer the sacrifice of my uninformed efforts, praying the godlets will be appeased, or at least not smite me too badly. Man-made godlets animated by human ghosts, the design choices made by inaccessible humans.
Especially in our age of abundance, humans *need* information curation. We need "prophets" – guides to the petty pantheon of systems we're expected to use. Which godlets should we approach, and how? How to keep up with myriad appeasement requirements more specific than *the* God's requirement to act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly?
Since there is no "view from nowhere", from which information can be curated with perfect objectivity, information is necessarily curated from some viewpoint. But viewpoints vary in honesty.
Claire recently summarized the US government transparency resources already available before DOGE came along:
DOGE might have made itself useful as a "transparency docent", curating information to help the public navigate the abundance of government transparency resources already available. Most of us are unlikely to know much about these resources. In a country as huge as ours, with a government as big as ours, why *would* we know where to start, unless we knew to research something specific? There *is* too much information available for typical citizens to navigate uncurated!
I have family who seem to think that DOGE *is* a reasonably trustworthy transparency docent, drawing the public's attention just about to where it should be drawn to make transparent government accessible to the great and good Trump-voting public.
My family includes people who recognize they're being advertised to when they hear the healthcare.gov jingle ( "Healthcare dot gov is here for you!" ), but who won't think of DOGE in the same way unless logically forced to. Of course, curation, even when it's honest, inevitably has some element of advertising, of directing users' attention selectively. They're willing to give DOGE the benefit of the doubt that its curation is basically honest despite well-documented errors and tendentiousness. They may judge that I don't extend DOGE the same benefit of the doubt because I hold unreasonably high standards for it, perhaps through bias or naivety.
People may think DOGE is a reasonably trustworthy transparency docent because they *want* a reasonably trustworthy transparency docent. DOGE claims it is one, so why not give it a chance? Wanting such a thing *is* reasonable – rightful, even. ("For Weber, a regime is not legitimate because it conforms to an abstract standard, but because subjects or citizens believe it to be rightful.") But charisma is also at work – not just top-down, but bottom-up:
Musk has made a big show of taking DOGE requests by Xeet, and any of us could, in a flash of bottom-up charisma (virality) be reXeeted by someone Musk might notice. To Xeet is thus to enter a lottery for representative-government-through-Xitterati whose odds might seem better to citizens than the odds of being noticed by our elected representatives are, especially considering how many more people representatives represent these days.
Xitter has been politically influential for years now. Gambling on it as a conduit for political representation may no longer feel so strange. The Xitter lottery for representation nonetheless strikes me as mostly illusory – and rigged: Musk's attention is drawn to trolls like Catturd and LibsOfTikTok, who are themselves likely to elevate forms of lunacy unrepresentative of what's left of sane America. Representation-by-Xeet is *not* an orderly form of representation. It is charismatic, though.
And, if you got lucky enough to win the lottery of representation-by-Xeet, then, for a moment, you wouldn't feel like a ghost to the Powers That Be.
"He promises re-enchantment through the destruction of the machine. He also promises that very soon, he will make everyone rich. He’s definitely not going to get both."
Some people, mostly people laundering bribes to him in the form of his meme coin, are going to get very rich.
But I'll make a prediction here. I suspect a "hardening of the autocracy" to come paid for by the poor and middle class in this country. The growth of income disparity over the decades is about the accelerate out of the coming recession into cyberpunk misery, where the American dream of a house and 2.5 kids will shrivel towards something resembling Victorian England, with a huge, impoverished class serving the rich (tech) industrialists.
That is certainly where the current trend leads. And with all the brown people deported and the Black people in prison, it will fall to the uneducated white people to be the servants.
A very significant number of Americans have been depoliticized. If asked, they can't answer basic questions about how the government works, who represents them, what the relationship is between the things the government does and what happens in their daily lives. Most don't read the news, or if they do, get it from sources that don't give them the information they need to think politically. As much as half of the adult public can't read well enough to understand a newspaper at all. I fear that poor and middle-class Americans will be the last to know that an autocracy is hardening around them, and even when they realize that things aren't going well, they'll have no idea why they aren't, or what to do about it.
They certainly have no reason to fix this problem. We're going to make cuts to social services and education, all the while sports betting is growing and supported by the government. My fear is that this is a feature, not a bug to them.
Do you think that they'll double down on blaming economic issues on immigrants, or do they need to add new targets of blame to their repertoire? They'll never take responsibility for the damage they're doing now, and somebody is going to have to take the fall for them.
Hi Claire. Thanks for the invitation! It seems to me that the immediate prognosis is really difficult to make with any confidence. There are too many variables. Trump is in his way a master politician. He's not competent in other ways but he has pretty much perfected a style of politics that is very hard to defeat as it's based on bragging and retreating. He tries something out - it works, he keeps at it. It does't work, he revises. The tariff bizzo is unimaginably dumb. He peels it back, starts micromanaging. That doesn't work? More back-pedal. The way is constantly shifting so hard to confront as it is, Weber way, charismatic at the same time it is chaotic. What's he gonna do next? Who knows? Even *he* doesn't necessarily know. The part that is ideological is slender, though it does exist. But as your site's name suggests, there is a longer term trend that sez your unworthy correspondent (me) is inexorable. Capitalism makes it so, until capitalism no longer works. The alternatives are a slide back into poverty-ridden abysses. or globalist trends toward socialism. Our present situation is opaque and the time when people again understand and promote an open society is not in front of us, clear as Popper wants us to see it. The issue with an open society is its uncertainty as an absolute! ha ha. Acceptance of ongoing change. Americans thought it was great until it stopped working for them. Where I stay, in NZ, is no different. People would like some certainty, the job for life, the retirement on a decent pension etc. The richer countries are having to give up some of that in order to retain what margins they can. It's not easy for them to do, but it's the way things are going to go. Leadership that spells this out is as the best bargain on offer is what is wanted, like the Reagan clip you posted not long ago. It's still wanted. Meanwhile, Trump's idea will sink the United States and elevate the Chinese and Indian styles. It's a long and arduous road and until and unless the US shakes off its navel gazing and realises its role as an open society, things are going to get worse not better.
The poverty of the poor is not a call to generous relief action, but a demand that we go and build a different social order.
-Gustavo Gutierrez
Given Gutierrez's frame, Weberian disenchantment can be cast as a kind of poverty--a loss of human sociability or connectedness.
I subscribe to your substack, Claire, because I respect, even find myself amazed at, the prolific reaches that you offer for your readers' consideration, often several per day. But it does seem possible to this reader that you may at times reserve your critiques for those bedevilments which probably most of us deem deserving of criticism: injustice, cowardice, stupidity, cruelty, authoritarianism, standard-definition terrorism.
I sometimes ask myself what the result might be if one were to take the scapel of your incisive and passionate critique to potential difficulties which you, it seems to me, tend to grant a kind of assumed legitimacy. Specifically, I am thinking about the creative-destructive and likely dehumanizing force of a carte blanche American capitalism, especially when it is coupled to the myth of the rugged American individual.
Yes to markets, yes to trade, yes to prosperity: no to the usurpation of every element of human existence by a corporate coup d'etat of universal scope.
While I am not well-enough versed in the inner workings of political economy, I generally know enough to admit when a thing seems to be broken. Your exposition of Weber's Puritan ethic driven to capitalist totalization reminds me of just how prescient Weber was.
In his essay, The Storyteller, Walter Benjamin laments the loss of story-telling's power for a people, when their society no longer espouses a tradition or a familiar moral which the story-teller can breathe new life into, and which story-hearers can carry with them in a shared experience. And yet . . .
The following is a question and response on my social media. It involved a post which read: "People are going to miss the federal government that they had." A friend named Holly initiated a short exchange which I provide here:
Holly:
How do we recover from this?
John Reply:
We know that by doing nothing, we won’t recover from the enormous impact of the trumpen’s governmental destruction.
So, we do what we can to first limit the trumpen’s damage while also remaining proactive, open to a restructuring of those elements which remain vital to democracy—by ending Citizens United, espousing values that engender people-centered policies like universal healthcare and weapons regulation. We reinstall equality measures across the board, renew our system of institutional checks and balances, keep private interests private and public interests public, strengthen the separation of church and state, foster liberal education, free thought, and the renewal of civic/political ethics, etc.
For any of this to have any possibility of being realized, it might need to be constructed—after a sound Repunklikkkan thrashing at the polls—under a younger, more visionary set of leaders who are more attuned to the future and who replace the present bunch of resentful white elitists clinging for dear life to a past that never really existed. trump will die. So will our generation. Free of us, the world may be better off.
Leaders like the women of the Squad, like Mayor Pete, smart young folks who run for local and state offices—I don't know what may still be possible after trump, Holly--probably no one knows—but we’ve survived two world wars which culminated in Auschwitz and atomic fireballs, we survived the Gilded Age, robber barons, the Great Depression, we contentiously survived institutionalized slavery, a rash of 1960s assassinations, and lots more.
These historical phenomena, our lived lives and their referents, yours and mine, exist in a different register, on a different plane, than the complex paradigms the world now confronts—globalism, technology, mass displacement, pandemics, lost community, deaths of despair—Still, something will develop and so I’m guessing we will probably come out on the other side of the current interregnum with promise and possibility and creative energy—all out of nothing except sheer necessity.
For all our faults—past, present, future—the world needs us to save ourselves.
Or not. Things are in flux. And some things cant be known ahead of time. Will Europe become a new United States? Will the world’s remaining democracies unite to take a stand against the trappings of authoritarian oligarchy?
If we do fail to save ourselves, eventually still, some person somewhere will dissent, will act, and after a period of abandoned hope, a new and wiser set of free-thinkers will dream their own dream of what’s to be.
Perhaps most simply (given the violent winds and intensifying tremors of global warming), the earth itself will rise against us and the human drive toward civilization will have to start its long arduous climb once more, from scratch as it were.
In the meantime, however, we love our babies, continue to cherish our nation’s ideals, occasionally witness nature’s sublime, and from time to time even align ourselves with whatever’s divine about us. These are the days of our lives, and it may be that these are the same lived days which themselves will save us.
It’s hard to make sense of it all, no? God bless you Holly. [God bless you, Claire] God bless us all.
I see scenario 2 - paralysis as most likely. My reasoning is that Trump's approval is declining. As one pundit said recently, it feels like Biden and Afghanistan. After his numbers dropped into the 30s, they never really recovered. The damage Trump is doing to Americans is only going to become more clear - he's not going to reverse HIS tariffs that he's been touting since the 1980s - so his numbers aren't going to improve.
Further, if his numbers drop into the 30s, the 9 House Republicans in toss-up races (see https://www.cookpolitical.com/ratings/house-race-ratings) are going to drop their loyalty to him. Their loyalty is to getting reelected.
Re the cult of personality around Obama: First of all, Trumpers fit the definition of cult of personality: an idealized and heroic image of a glorious leader, often through unquestioning flattery and praise . . . developed through techniques such as the manipulation of the mass media, the dissemination of propaganda, the staging of spectacles, the manipulation of the arts, the instilling of patriotism . . ." (Wikipedia).
But this is not the characterization of Obama supporters. Obama was treated more like a rockstar than a cult leader. Maybe there were some creepily devoted fans, but none of the Dems I knew were among them. To quote Left Libertarian danielbgoo on Reddit, none of Obama's supporters believed "he was going to pull off miracles like spontaneous healing or bringing JFK Jr. back from the dead." We could actually see he was intelligent, well read and could think clearly enough that he could write, which of course appealed to the college grads who dominated Dem politics. What we believed that turned out to be wrong was that his win would introduce the post-racial world. We didn't realize that there is always white backlash to racial progress.
Further, many Dems were disappointed by his inability to use the bully pulpit to get Americans behind the Affordable Care Act and to build relationships with House and Senate members because of his aversion to that kind of politicking. On the contrary, in Trump's cult, there is NO criticism of Dear Leader.
So I don't think it is fair to characterize Obama's supporters as members of a cult. However, to say his charismatic appeal foreshadowed Trump's is. But you don't need the "cult of personality" dig at Obama to make that point. You can just acknowledge he was charismatic.
According to someone like Leonord Zeskind ("Blood and Politics") there would be no cause for surprise. White nationalism was always in the mainstream, there's a direct line from David Duke of the KKK through Pat Buchanan to Donald Trump; white supremacists reacted to the defeat they saw in civil rights reforms of the 1960s by remaking themselves as anti-immigrant zealots. Race was always the indigestible ingredient in America's supposed "melting pot" - as it moved through three centuries of race war to expel and exterminate the original inhabitants of the land, taking their land and resources and exploited the captive labor of black slaves to build the empire of cotton and the basis of American capitalism. Inequality and domination were the crucial aspects of racial separation, but also of the millionaires of the Gilded Age and the new barons thrown up by advances in the first decades of the 20th century. Liberal America or progressive America was beaten down for a long time, whether in the Popular Party of the late 19th century or by Andrew Mellon's hard money policies in Herbert Hoover's presidency. As for religious fundamentalism, that again was not new to America, but part of its very founding, from the fanaticism of the Puritans awaiting the end of the world, through the Great Awakening, to the various sects and cults foretelling the rapture or new prophecies by home-grown prophets in the 19th century, and the mass movements using radio and TV of the 20th and 21st centuries. Many Americans were never comfortable with science or a secular view of the world, explanations not from ancient Middle Eastern myths of origins, evolution, kinship with primates rather than angels.
FDR's New Deal and the traumas of the Great Depression, along with the mobilization and unity brought by WW2 helped the less privileged, reduced social and economic inequality, and the consensus was not quite undone even by Republican administrations until the 1980s. From Ronald Reagan, the great roll-back began, and inequality grew again, to take monstrous proportions. It was not difficult to find a suitable greedy and vicious but charismatic politician to whom to link the
aspirations of billionaires to overthrow democracy, destroy what remained of social democracy, and
give full expression to ethnic nationalism. In this view of the world, looting and exploitation would
only be normal, and hence acceptable whether in Putin's Russia or Xi's China, along with nationalist
and imperialist expansion and resource grabs. That's America today.
What will America become? That's a hard question - the situation is unstable and may not lead to a cementing of an autocracy for purely circumstantial reasons. Trump is old at 79, much older than Putin and Erdogan when they hit their prime and began to consolidate power. The Project 2025 "shock and awe" campaign took full aim at the professional civil service and the structures of government, the liberal bastions of universities and free expression in media, the courts, and mobilized the MAGA foot-soldiers with deliberate displays of gratuitous cruelty in deportations. Yet this combination of taking the bread from the mouths of the poor through spending cuts and consolidating the power of billionaires and a criminal presidency is not sound. Destroying the capacity of the state to raise revenues will only increase chaos and anarchy. Popular discontent is unpredictable. America still doesn't have China's capacity to put a tight lid on dissent - it doesn't have 600 million security monitors around the country or a ministry of the interior monitoring the internet. Right-wing vigilante mobs are limited in effectiveness. With better organization and leadership, the tyranny could still be overthrown.
I am aware of this history. But it exists in a context broader than just white supremacism. Two more recent books, both by historians, were published in 2024, so they account for the Trump win in 2016 and nomination in 2024: "Illiberal America: A History" by Steven Hahn and "Rebellion: How Antiliberalism Is Tearing America Apart—Again" by Robert Kagan. Certainly since the Anti-Federalists, we've been a more or less divided country except for FDR's 3 ½ terms, when conditions were at their worst.
But I don't think that history necessarily leads directly to Trump because none of the other illiberals in our history ever made it to the White House. He was unique in exploiting the white backlash after Obama's win in 2008 and winning the White House because of two factors that never existed in the political environments where illiberal like David Duke ran for president. One is social media. The other is he was a TV celebrity.
Agreed, there's a broader context. Thanks for pointing that out. I also agree history does not mean the inevitability of Trump as president once or for a second term. That's like saying (which is true) Germany's prior history and the deep roots of antisemitism didn't mean the inevitability of Hitler or the Holocaust. There is always an interplay of trends and circumstances. Probabilities of some outcomes are cumulative, but there's a a random element. Donald Trump's charisma is real; his TV persona was manufactured, but it helped. He was a man for a certain time - but also, as you note, the reaction to Obama was present and powerful. The rise of the IT billionaires was not obvious ex ante. The role of Russia was at least an additional factor in the rise of Trump - not least through Russian oligarchs' and mafia money of more than a billion dollars (according to Craig Unger's documented history) washing through his real estate investments, and much of the permeable Republican Party taking Russian money. In addition, the 2016 election saw Russian state-sponsored hacking and dark propaganda in collaboration with right-wing American activists, focused interventions using the Mercer apparatus in swing states. Finally, the take-over of the Supreme Court was not predictable, but testified to the power of dark money lobbies and Republican manipulation of institutions and processes (McConnell's tactics, Obama's "gentlemanly" staying above the fray, etc.)
Were there self-inflicted wounds of Democrats? Almost certainly, according to most people. The volatility of the theme of immigration was not a secret after Trump had exploited it, in reacting towards more humane approaches, opening the southern border for three years, together with Republican blocking of a bipartisan immigration bill, provided more fuel to the Trump fire. The slow and relatively ineffective process of holding Trump to account for leading a failed coup in January 2021 only gave time for the false narrative to spread of the stolen election, and for Trump to consolidate his hold on the Republican Party and the MAGA foot-soldiers.
There are more analyses in depth of the transformation of the Republican Party into an extreme right-wing insurgency - or as many would now say, a cult led by a criminal in search of only power and money. On strongmen, as you are probably aware, Ruth Ben-Ghiat is very good. Here's her view of the current situation in an excellent interview with Prospect (U.K.):
I am aware of Ruth. All those other factors are at play, but not unique to the Trump era, specifically Russian attempts to divide Americans. That’s been going on since the Cold War began. White backlash is also not unique. But I think him being a TV celebrity and his Twitter-based campaign are. Your thoughts?
It's not that "all those other factors" were unique, but for various reasons played a more important role in the rise of Trump. Some of those reasons you have mentioned - the reaction to Obama's presidency, for instance, which gave a boost to white nationalism to "take back" the country, an old reactionary project. Also, while there had been Soviet attempts to influence elections in the Cold War, there's no precedent for an American presidential candidate who was plausibly a Russian asset, rescued from bankruptcy by Russian money, parroting talking points (including the Birther Scandal) from the propaganda channel of America's main adversary, Russia Today. The Republican Party's earlier nominating procedures wouldn't have given a free pass to a candidate like Trump.
As for the role of TV and Twitter in establishing his (brand) image and building and consolidating Trump's base, by all means, they were very important. For what it's worth, if radio gave the world Mussolini and Hitler, it also gave it Churchill and FDR. Would they have been who they were without the media? No. Trump without TV or Twitter? Also, no. The times and the history and the society mesh with the personality, media are the bridge through which the personality builds a myth and a rhetoric, a following and leadership, crafts a new reality for followers. As a German who attended one of Hitler's rallies remembered, there was a wave of emotion, an electric rapture which caught up the audience - and although he knew personally that the content of the speech was rubbish, he was moved by the emotion himself.
See also this link on media in the French Revolution - media always mattered! Those days people read pamphlets and newspapers; there were a huge number of printed images, songs, satires, special festivals and carnivals (e.g. the Festivals of the Federation, of Reason, and of the Supreme Being).
Claire, what is this statement based on? "(T)he other half (of the American public), it seems to me, is only weakly committed to the legal-rational state, and to the extent it is, it is more because our rules and laws are traditional than because they still believe in them"? My reading of the public's support of legal-rational due process is that it is not weak, but strong.
Here is some data to support that: "(A) strong majority of voters, including majorities across party lines, believe that immigrants with green cards and visas should have the right to be informed of the charges against them (81%), the right to a fair trial (77%), the right to present a defense (75%), and the right to appeal a court decision (69%).
That's more than half of the public, and it doesn't look weak to me. Also, it is not half who "attached itself to Donald Trump and legitimizes what he does by virtue of his charisma", it is around a third.
What I had in mind, when I wrote that, specifically, is the fact that Trump staged an insurrection against the United States and was not only not imprisoned, but allowed to run for office again. You could say that this is Merrick Garland's fault (and that would be true in a significant sense), but most Americans accepted this as somehow normal. Biden didn't fire Garland. The general sentiment, I think, was that it was too dangerous to apply the law to Trump--the problem would have to be settled at the ballot box. If we still had a more-than-weak attachment to our laws and our Constitution, Trump would long ago have been behind bars.
Thx for your reply. What do you mean by too dangerous - that violence would occur? I thought the danger was political, meaning being perceived as going against their predecessor, so they investigated as they do a mob boss, from the bottom up, starting with the rioters. Rather than a weak attachment to our laws, many legal analysts I follow saw it as a mis-reading of the political moment, that this was normal times.
Yes, I think that's what Garland was thinking: it was too dangerous because it would lead to violence. I don't believe the story that they were just starting from the bottom, business-as-usual style. I don't believe they could have failed to recognize that Trump was a profound threat to the Republic--and a dangerous criminal who needed to be behind bars. I think they lacked the courage to apply the law.
And it's not enough to express support for something in a poll. The degree to which you'll *defend* that thing represents the value you place on it. Most Americans have accepted Trump's lawlessness. There are scattered protests, but mostly organized by the far-left. We're not seeing the kind of overwhelming mass movement that would be required to interrupt the trajectory we're on. I don't imagine we will, either: See my comment, above, about the depoliticization of the American public.
Fair enough about polls. Agree about who's organizing the street protests, but I don't know about who's participating in them - how many are the swing state Trump voters, Independents and educated, suburban Rs? Same with the town hall protests. I don't know the makeup of the participants. Are they just Dems?
And I don't think the overwhelming mass movement to stop the trajectory is the goal. I think the only feasible goal, as I understand it from Sarah Longwell, is the Dems to take the House in the midterms, which only disrupts the trajectory.
According to the Cook Political Report, there are 9 toss-up races held by Rs. If his approval rating drops into the 30s, look for those 9 to begin straying from their loyalty to Trump, and the R candidates in the 10 toss-up races held by Ds struggle to define themselves as Republicans. Approval ratings are pretty good predictors. The difference between the Rs bailing on Nixon in '74 and their loyalty to Trump today is the approval rating. Nixon's went below 30 when Goldwater et.al. told Nixon to resign, lest he become impeached.
Look, prior to Trump the US was experiencing a sociopathic death spiral in our professional classes, something well documented by both social science research and major population surveys. US institutions were beyond dead at this point, they were undead zombie predators. It was highly predictable (and predicted!) that voters would turn to strongmen to protect them from predatory elites, yet to this day no serious talk of what institutional reforms are needed to prevent sociopathic capture of institutions has happened.
The postwar American state has been collapsing in slow motion ever since the oil shock of the 70s. Before the 70s Western governments consistently grew both capital to worker ratios and income simultaneously with the cooperation (if sometimed grudging) of the managerial class.
Pretty much all the tools the government used to do this were abolished in either the late 70s, late 90s or under Barack Obama of all people. State capacity was crippled long before Trump came on the scene. There is something wrong if the only policy lever a government has to drive growth is mass immigration.
This is Tim writing from Rachel's account. She asked me to share my observations.
When we were in college in the early 2000s the million-dollar question circulating in the philosophy/history/theology circles was: "Post-modern relativism ending; what comes next?" I think we are seeing what comes next in what you have identified as "re-enchantment."
I'm not familiar with the Weber you were citing, but it seems that his idea of disenchantment is well-attested in the likes of Nietzsche, T.S. Eliot, Yeats, and any number of thinkers who bewailed the desolation of industrialization and the Lost Generation of WWI. The roots of the disenchantment go to the Enlightenment and beyond, but the bitter fruits really only became evident in the 20th century.
You are on to something when you say that Trump is benefiting from a "longing for re-enchantment." The examples you give of the religious right, nerd reich, rejection of medicine for magic, and alternative facts are all apropos of the negative shadow side of re-enchantment. These indicate a grasping at power through a search for meaning. There is a positive side, however.
Re-enchantment is not merely a rejection of rationality. In the Christian circles where I live and work there is much hope in an apparent upturn of people actually finding meaning and not just searching for it. They are finding it outside themselves and not merely imposing it on themselves the way the disenchanted world seemed to require it.
Your article is only the latest place that I have encountered re-enchantment as an observation of what's going on in the world. And yours is the only place I have seen focus on the negative results of it. I first felt it when I read the works of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien in their task of providing new myths for the contemporary west. I first heard the word circulated as a kind of underground in-joke in Eastern Orthodox and Traditional Catholic podcasts. It was then given fuller exposition through the public work of people like Jordan Peterson, Jonathan Pageau, and Bishop Robert Barron. And the most comprehensive treatment of it I've seen, including actual statistical data, is in the work of Justin Brierley (https://justinbrierley.com/the-surprising-rebirth-of-belief-in-god).
All that to say... I think you are right in identifying what unifies the weird Trump coalition. Re-enchantment tends away from the legal-rational legitimacy. Trump is doing a lot of damage. And there is a bigger picture that includes some hope.
To answer your final few questions regarding whether democracy has a chance, I just point to Plato in the Republic where he shows democracy as the last step on the road to tyranny. It's a good thing that government doesn't determine our final destiny.
The US may well be on the way to a self-inflicted economic disaster led by a charismatic charlatan and fueled by an enchantment with unregulated capitalism. A large number of Americans have lost their belief in a system that has cost them their dignity and their hope for the future, making them vulnerable to the charm of the charlatan. In the rubble of that disaster it might be possible, using the productive potential of capitalism, to rebuild a system that provides economic security for all Americans. But my fear is that the coming crisis will be either too mild to unrig the current economic system, or too serious to permit a rebuild. Bureaucracy is an epithet to many of our citizens, but it is absolutely essential to a stable economic or political order. It will be necessary to rebuild the bureaucracies that the current regime is so carelessly and willfully dismantling if we are to enjoy the blessings of the liberty our ancestors bequeathed to us at the cost of their blood, toil, tears, and treasure. My fear is that we are headed back to the 15th century, but with better technology.
Could Weber have an imagined a Trump-like character? Mmm, maybe yes, to the pathological lying, the bombast and the delusional persecution complex, for they aptly harness the fascist’s favorite thing - an ignorant propagandized voter. But, no, the oval occupier’s incompetence, incoherence, the clown-like, painted cartoon villain face, no. The youngsters recoil at the glaring ineptitude and amateurish side show of political theater emanating from this imbecile and his thugs, the lie spew, the intransigence, the faltering economy, the false promises, the iterative reoccurring blame fixing. The daily dripping horror show will be his and Project 2025’s undoing, I pray.
Old and young, right and left, the people must continue standing up, must stand up more, louder. The press must continue shining their klieg light. We must find the rising voice of next leader, the loud, bold, factual, charismatic, articulate force.
I am terrified, enraged, hopeful.
I’m late to this discussion, which is fascinating. I have no clear idea now of how the Trump debacle will end but I sense that it is a reactionary movement at its core, that is attempting to drag us back to a time of tariffs, no income tax, Manifest Destiny to acquire countries like Canada and Greenland — and a traditionalist form of Christianity and unremitting if empty flag waving. People are afraid. Of “post-modernity”, of the implosion of the nuclear family and the extension of family to new forms with IVF, gays and lesbians and trans people having children, “chosen” families of friends, and an encroaching secular society that is nonetheless filled with pagan elements like Burning Man and weird art and — new hybrids of religious ritual and thinking — the “spiritual”. So there is this THING, this reactionary movement run on resentment and fear. Yes, there’s also the rust belt and the hallowing out of American manufacturing, and the way people often have to work two or three jobs just to pay the rent. Social media has had an effect — fueling fears and misinformation — encouraging virtual tribalism. But how will it end? Reactionary movements don’t win in the long haul. You can’t force people to go back to 1919, 1930 or — the Middle Ages. These folks are living in their imagining of an earlier, better time. The reality was far different. They don’t actually want to give up their iPhones.
I predict that in time, there will be a reckoning and most people will not stand by MAGA’s fantasies. It may be violent and there may be a form of civil war. But I also believe we will come out of this, because people don’t really want to go back. They can’t anyway. There will be damage, but somehow we will get it together — changed — but we will continue. Now what the “change” will be, I’m not sure. But it won’t be a forced and fake return to an earlier idealized time… I hope it will be a better time than what led to this. But honestly, I don’t think I can describe it yet…
And I must add, I hope that our constitution is intact. It may be… but there may be something added to strengthen the guardrails so that a strong man doesn’t appear again and take power. It is shocking how Trump has seized control of institutions… or nearly seized control. We are in a battle and we are being tested. I think we will come out of it but — there will likely be violence and — this won’t be easy.
Think what they are doing right now, every day, below the surface, to stop free and fair elections. It will be here well before midterms. They are rigging everything to favor authoritarian fascist rule.
We are in it.
Laws, policies, regs must be reimagined, rewritten, tightened up and reinforced, so as to prevent any toxic, lie-spewing pretender ever again to grab the reins of American power. This, if good, fair honest, informed masses of Americans are smart enough and lucky enough to retake power from current cadre of fascist liars.
Where is Jay? He posted a link to a great lecture on Nietzsche back in October - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JuVFfgTkwn0 - all about the lack of "meaning-conferring narratives" in liberal-democratic materialism. It's pretty much the dis/re-enchantment story all over.
Thank you, Claire, for an excellent framing of our dilemma. "The longing for re-enchantment" hits the nail on the head. Many of the members of the Trump cult see him as either godlike or blessed by God. Trump's escape from assassination by a matter of inches feeds into this, and Trump has played the Divine Intervention card to the hilt.
Another dimension of the problem, implied but not made explicit in your analysis, is the grip of tribalism on our political perceptions, on both sides of the left-right divide. After all, millions of year of human social evolution took place in tribes--if you were not a "team player" you were less likely to find and keep a mate to pass on your genes. Thus biologically most of us are wired for tribalism: it is the default social arrangement. In times of uncertainty people tend to revert to the comfort of tribalism.
And boy do we have uncertainty! The disruptions of the digital age intensify uncertainty across the political spectrum. Social media with their abundant "rabbit holes" and our fractured media landscape in general facilitate the renewal of tribalism. Wherever we are going politically has to accommodate the biases of tribalism, even as they rip apart the norms of The Enlightenment upon which the American political system has been based. Social relations WITHIN individual tribes consisting of less than a few hundred individuals tend to be democratic, but democracy is fragile in a state comprising multiple tribes. That's especially when one major tribe rejects the principle that diversity makes for strength; for example, the war on DEI flows from this rejection, and that provokes a hostile reaction from those who embrace DEI, hardening the existing tribal lines even more. Just watch Rachel Maddow for one hour and sense the lines of tribalism brighten, and hopes for democracy across the country darken.
I don't see a lasting resolution that does not liberate the tribes from the bonds of a cohesive "United" States. The 21st Century is showing us they are now incompatible. One group--a "Blue" group committed to the Weberian "legal-rational" model--would have to find a way to separate itself from a" Red" group, currently dominated by the "charismatic" figure of Donald Trump, that will segue upon his death into traditional authoritarianism, even dictatorship. HOW this could be accomplished--"Blue" states vs "Red: states?-- is not easily pictured, but if it doesn't we're likely to slide into despotism, tying the two tribes together by force. (Obviously this is an oversimplification: there are more than two tribes, but there's a possibility for coalitions of tribes to form into supertribes.)
BTW, thank you for the "Nerd Reich." That's a delicious coinage, wherever it came from. It's good to find something to laugh at in this period of dread.
Recently Claire and I posted here about political psychologist Karen Stenner, who studies those with what she calls the authoritarian disposition, an enduring and universal personality type, about a third of any population (think the MAGA third) . She says, "Democracy is most secure, and tolerance is maximized, when we design systems to accommodate how people actually are. Because some people will never live comfortably in a modern liberal democracy" (https://www.karenstenner.com). Her recommendation for accommodating how this third of Americans actually are is helping them, our fellow citizens, to be their best selves. See the Where Do We Go From Here? section of “Magazine: Essay – Authoritarianism (https://hopenothate.org.uk/2020/11/01/authoritarianism/) for what that involves.
I think she is not saying that we are incompatible, but rather that they are who they are and we can co-exist if we who value and are comfortable with our "legal-rational" liberal democracy and our Constitution accommodate them. For me, that's the way forward, and it can be done IF the right political leadership emerges.
The key, of course, is, as you say, if the right political leadership emerges. Unfortunately our ossified binary political party system tends to make that more difficult. The Founders understood that when they at first eschewed ‘factionalism’ then, being all too human, went right ahead and initiated it anyway. My sense of irony is always tickled by the formal name of Jefferson’s mob, the Democratic Republicans.
In a recent interview with Jon Stewart, the historian Jon Meacham suggested that the Founders would have been surprised that the experiment they launched has lasted as long as it has.
I have heard other historians say the same. Joseph Ellis says they’d be surprised we still had the Electoral College. The hatred between Adams and Jefferson is just stunning, after their close, essential collaboration on the Declaration.
Ossified is certainly fair, especially the Dems. The Rs are just corrupted. What do you think of the idea that leaders emerge in times of crisis? Lincoln being an example.
Adams and Jefferson - Remember that in their later years their correspondence was anything but hate-filled as they discussed what was becoming of the nation they had done so much to create. Neither one was entirely happy with the direction in which they saw it going. In a way, I’ve always thought of them as the opposite poles of a debate we are still having, the balance between the value of centralized power and the needs of the community on the one hand and the need for individual rights and freedom on the other - indeed, the most ancient and enduring debate humanity has been having ever since ’the kingship descended from Heaven’ in ancient Sumer.
Electoral College - which of course does not function in the way it was designed and intended, due almost entirely to its weaponization by the two political parties - most especially the Republicans. That’s what I meant by my characterization of our binary system - that all too often it forces so many of us into an ‘us and them’ mode which places party loyalty above all else - too often at the expense of the country’s best interests.
The possibility of the Great Man theory in history - the prime example being WWII when a collection of charismatic leaders around the world first catapulted us into the maelstrom and then got us out of it by the skin of our teeth. Did it take a Hitler and a Mussolini to make a Churchill, a Roosevelt, or a Stalin (and before you question that last choice, remember that it was Stalinist Russia that broke the back of the Wehrmacht.)? I don’t know. How does one calculate if any given leader who never faced a crisis and is not well remembered might have become world-historical if he or she had faced one. Without the Revolution, who would remember Washington? What would Kamala Harris have made of the presidency? How would JFK be remembered without those 13 October days, and Dallas?
Is it the crisis who meets the man/woman or the man/woman who meets the crisis? Perhaps Trumpism will give us the answer. Indeed, I’ve found myself thinking of late that we needed Trumpism, just as we once needed the Civil War. Maybe Jefferson was right about the regular need for patriot blood or its political equivalent, but just not every 20 years.
Thanks for your responses, James. My replies:
1. I do know about their final years. They were old men no longer full of piss and vinegar. And because of that, they no longer had any influence on the national discourse. Further, it was Adams who initiated their final correspondence. That story would make for a great PBS feature to educate Americans about our bi-furcated founding that has endured throughout our history.
2. Agree about the enduring nature of their debate. The anti-Federalists feared centralized power. They feared the educated elites. Isn't that exactly what MAGA fears?
3. Can you explain what you mean by this: "The Electoral College does not function in the way it was designed"?
4. I don't think Jefferson was right about the need for revolution every 20 years if we look at our history. The system that the Framers designed did NOT require such blood until the scourge of slavery threatened Free Soil.
3. Since there were no formal political parties at the time, there could not have been ‘faithful’ or ‘unfaithful’ electors. They were intended to be independent, able to make their own choices.
2. I don’t think the anti-Federalists can legitimately be compared to MAGA. They certainly feared the prospect of a centralized power, but their fear was not about elites but rather about what they saw as the monarchical tendencies of the Federalists (which in Hamilton’s case was not entirely unjustified) but MAGA, despite its protests to the contrary is all about centralized power. Otherwise they would never have backed Trump, who is all about centralized power. That is one of main internal contradictions of MAGA. They are trying to back two horses galloping in two opposite directions. And they are starting to see that as Trump 2.0 diverges from their overly rosy memories of Trump 1.0.
4. Jefferson wasn’t right, most clearly demonstrated in his continued backing of the French Revolution even when it descended into bloody chaos. He actually thought the whole show should be renewed every now and again, with the past thrown out. In terms of government, he was too revolutionary for his own good. At the same time, as President, he often contradicted his own beliefs, tending toward centralized decision making.
1. I think it is hardly fair to say that Adams and Jefferson had no influence as they aged, although what they did have was certainly indirect at best. What we need to remember is the radical nature of our founding, and that they, as ‘present at the creation’ were in a very good position to understand what their original design was evolving into and what mistakes they might have made. And neither of them was happy about it.
Our central problem, as I see it, is that as human beings we are ourselves an internal contradiction, and so it is hardly strange that our governments, even the best of them, are also such.
Not many clear scenarios on my side. Only a comment on legitimacy: from all characteristic of western governance, democracy is the most underlined but not the most important. First, the people cannot rule and does not rule: at most we can ask “the consent of the governed”. A large Number of people cannot actively rule.
Too much weigth is put on the extremely small popular input (R or D every 4 years) in this system. We need to legitimate our real structures of governance: the judiciary, the civil service, the public opinion… the large machinery of freedom and prosperity derives all its legitimacy from a ritual that happens once in each 4 years. A filmsy foundation for such a large structure…
I agree.
To follow up on my previous comment that "One thing that happens as a supposedly rational system gets too unaccountable – or merely too difficult for any but expert users to navigate – is that rules stop feeling predictable, and we feel like we're losing control", we may describe this unaccountability as dehumanizing. Nonetheless, we're still using systems designed by humans for humans.
The problem isn't that human involvement is absent (even AI cribs from Nabokov to call itself "a democracy of ghosts", ghosts of the humans whose decisions and work AI ingests for data: https://x.com/sama/status/1899535387435086115 ) but that human involvement has become unaccountable, a ghost, intangible to us. And we may feel, in turn, that we're ghosts to it, that we're beings a system is no longer designed to register. (Unless and until, that is, we're blessed with the bottom-up charisma of coming to DOGE's attention because our Xeet was reXeeted until Musk deigned to take an interest – more on that at the end.)
For example, the supermarket nearest me encourages self-checkout. The self-checkout kiosks have the usual self-checkout scales for loss prevention, and these scales have a weight limit, beyond which self-checkout crashes and the whole transaction is voided. A kiosk obviously must record weight *somewhere* in its system in order to crash when its weight limit is exceeded, but this information is invisible to the user. The weight limit isn't posted. We don't see a readout of the weight we've already got on the scale. There's no alert that a customer is approaching the weight limit and likely to void the transaction with the weight of another item. The choice to deny the human user any of this information was a *human* choice.
It may be an understandable human choice. As average household size shrinks, the people likely to buy in quantities likely to exceed the weight limit may be too few to matter. But for those with heavier grocery hauls, this also turns each self-checkout kiosk into a little god we must make our best guess to appease should we dare approach it. The kiosk knows with greater certainty than we do how close we are to its weight limit, but doesn't tell us, only smites us with a voided transaction should we "sin" against it.
The kiosks become little gods because they use information which has been curated – by humans – to exclude human-readable information important to some of the humans using it.
I can gain the expertise, or at least proficiency, to disenchant *some* of the godlets I encounter, reducing them to mere tools of reasoning that I can master – but who has the time to become proficient (much less expert) in *all* of them? Most user interfaces must remain, to my limited self, altars to petty, inscrutable gods, where I offer the sacrifice of my uninformed efforts, praying the godlets will be appeased, or at least not smite me too badly. Man-made godlets animated by human ghosts, the design choices made by inaccessible humans.
Especially in our age of abundance, humans *need* information curation. We need "prophets" – guides to the petty pantheon of systems we're expected to use. Which godlets should we approach, and how? How to keep up with myriad appeasement requirements more specific than *the* God's requirement to act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly?
Since there is no "view from nowhere", from which information can be curated with perfect objectivity, information is necessarily curated from some viewpoint. But viewpoints vary in honesty.
Claire recently summarized the US government transparency resources already available before DOGE came along:
https://claireberlinski.substack.com/p/dangerous-as-hell
DOGE might have made itself useful as a "transparency docent", curating information to help the public navigate the abundance of government transparency resources already available. Most of us are unlikely to know much about these resources. In a country as huge as ours, with a government as big as ours, why *would* we know where to start, unless we knew to research something specific? There *is* too much information available for typical citizens to navigate uncurated!
I have family who seem to think that DOGE *is* a reasonably trustworthy transparency docent, drawing the public's attention just about to where it should be drawn to make transparent government accessible to the great and good Trump-voting public.
My family includes people who recognize they're being advertised to when they hear the healthcare.gov jingle ( "Healthcare dot gov is here for you!" ), but who won't think of DOGE in the same way unless logically forced to. Of course, curation, even when it's honest, inevitably has some element of advertising, of directing users' attention selectively. They're willing to give DOGE the benefit of the doubt that its curation is basically honest despite well-documented errors and tendentiousness. They may judge that I don't extend DOGE the same benefit of the doubt because I hold unreasonably high standards for it, perhaps through bias or naivety.
People may think DOGE is a reasonably trustworthy transparency docent because they *want* a reasonably trustworthy transparency docent. DOGE claims it is one, so why not give it a chance? Wanting such a thing *is* reasonable – rightful, even. ("For Weber, a regime is not legitimate because it conforms to an abstract standard, but because subjects or citizens believe it to be rightful.") But charisma is also at work – not just top-down, but bottom-up:
Musk has made a big show of taking DOGE requests by Xeet, and any of us could, in a flash of bottom-up charisma (virality) be reXeeted by someone Musk might notice. To Xeet is thus to enter a lottery for representative-government-through-Xitterati whose odds might seem better to citizens than the odds of being noticed by our elected representatives are, especially considering how many more people representatives represent these days.
Xitter has been politically influential for years now. Gambling on it as a conduit for political representation may no longer feel so strange. The Xitter lottery for representation nonetheless strikes me as mostly illusory – and rigged: Musk's attention is drawn to trolls like Catturd and LibsOfTikTok, who are themselves likely to elevate forms of lunacy unrepresentative of what's left of sane America. Representation-by-Xeet is *not* an orderly form of representation. It is charismatic, though.
And, if you got lucky enough to win the lottery of representation-by-Xeet, then, for a moment, you wouldn't feel like a ghost to the Powers That Be.
I'm often reluctant to make predictions.
"He promises re-enchantment through the destruction of the machine. He also promises that very soon, he will make everyone rich. He’s definitely not going to get both."
Some people, mostly people laundering bribes to him in the form of his meme coin, are going to get very rich.
But I'll make a prediction here. I suspect a "hardening of the autocracy" to come paid for by the poor and middle class in this country. The growth of income disparity over the decades is about the accelerate out of the coming recession into cyberpunk misery, where the American dream of a house and 2.5 kids will shrivel towards something resembling Victorian England, with a huge, impoverished class serving the rich (tech) industrialists.
That is certainly where the current trend leads. And with all the brown people deported and the Black people in prison, it will fall to the uneducated white people to be the servants.
Trump seems vain enough that, as long as they're sufficiently submissive, he'll find room for anyone and ignore their skin tone.
This is what I fear.
A very significant number of Americans have been depoliticized. If asked, they can't answer basic questions about how the government works, who represents them, what the relationship is between the things the government does and what happens in their daily lives. Most don't read the news, or if they do, get it from sources that don't give them the information they need to think politically. As much as half of the adult public can't read well enough to understand a newspaper at all. I fear that poor and middle-class Americans will be the last to know that an autocracy is hardening around them, and even when they realize that things aren't going well, they'll have no idea why they aren't, or what to do about it.
They certainly have no reason to fix this problem. We're going to make cuts to social services and education, all the while sports betting is growing and supported by the government. My fear is that this is a feature, not a bug to them.
Do you think that they'll double down on blaming economic issues on immigrants, or do they need to add new targets of blame to their repertoire? They'll never take responsibility for the damage they're doing now, and somebody is going to have to take the fall for them.
Hi Claire. Thanks for the invitation! It seems to me that the immediate prognosis is really difficult to make with any confidence. There are too many variables. Trump is in his way a master politician. He's not competent in other ways but he has pretty much perfected a style of politics that is very hard to defeat as it's based on bragging and retreating. He tries something out - it works, he keeps at it. It does't work, he revises. The tariff bizzo is unimaginably dumb. He peels it back, starts micromanaging. That doesn't work? More back-pedal. The way is constantly shifting so hard to confront as it is, Weber way, charismatic at the same time it is chaotic. What's he gonna do next? Who knows? Even *he* doesn't necessarily know. The part that is ideological is slender, though it does exist. But as your site's name suggests, there is a longer term trend that sez your unworthy correspondent (me) is inexorable. Capitalism makes it so, until capitalism no longer works. The alternatives are a slide back into poverty-ridden abysses. or globalist trends toward socialism. Our present situation is opaque and the time when people again understand and promote an open society is not in front of us, clear as Popper wants us to see it. The issue with an open society is its uncertainty as an absolute! ha ha. Acceptance of ongoing change. Americans thought it was great until it stopped working for them. Where I stay, in NZ, is no different. People would like some certainty, the job for life, the retirement on a decent pension etc. The richer countries are having to give up some of that in order to retain what margins they can. It's not easy for them to do, but it's the way things are going to go. Leadership that spells this out is as the best bargain on offer is what is wanted, like the Reagan clip you posted not long ago. It's still wanted. Meanwhile, Trump's idea will sink the United States and elevate the Chinese and Indian styles. It's a long and arduous road and until and unless the US shakes off its navel gazing and realises its role as an open society, things are going to get worse not better.
Re what's he gonna do next, every time someone asks this question, comedian John Mulaney's bit about Trump (five years ago!) comes to mind: https://youtu.be/JhkZMxgPxXU?si=RgzKmHCdk839ud3I.
It's hysterical. Enjoy.
The poverty of the poor is not a call to generous relief action, but a demand that we go and build a different social order.
-Gustavo Gutierrez
Given Gutierrez's frame, Weberian disenchantment can be cast as a kind of poverty--a loss of human sociability or connectedness.
I subscribe to your substack, Claire, because I respect, even find myself amazed at, the prolific reaches that you offer for your readers' consideration, often several per day. But it does seem possible to this reader that you may at times reserve your critiques for those bedevilments which probably most of us deem deserving of criticism: injustice, cowardice, stupidity, cruelty, authoritarianism, standard-definition terrorism.
I sometimes ask myself what the result might be if one were to take the scapel of your incisive and passionate critique to potential difficulties which you, it seems to me, tend to grant a kind of assumed legitimacy. Specifically, I am thinking about the creative-destructive and likely dehumanizing force of a carte blanche American capitalism, especially when it is coupled to the myth of the rugged American individual.
Yes to markets, yes to trade, yes to prosperity: no to the usurpation of every element of human existence by a corporate coup d'etat of universal scope.
While I am not well-enough versed in the inner workings of political economy, I generally know enough to admit when a thing seems to be broken. Your exposition of Weber's Puritan ethic driven to capitalist totalization reminds me of just how prescient Weber was.
In his essay, The Storyteller, Walter Benjamin laments the loss of story-telling's power for a people, when their society no longer espouses a tradition or a familiar moral which the story-teller can breathe new life into, and which story-hearers can carry with them in a shared experience. And yet . . .
The following is a question and response on my social media. It involved a post which read: "People are going to miss the federal government that they had." A friend named Holly initiated a short exchange which I provide here:
Holly:
How do we recover from this?
John Reply:
We know that by doing nothing, we won’t recover from the enormous impact of the trumpen’s governmental destruction.
So, we do what we can to first limit the trumpen’s damage while also remaining proactive, open to a restructuring of those elements which remain vital to democracy—by ending Citizens United, espousing values that engender people-centered policies like universal healthcare and weapons regulation. We reinstall equality measures across the board, renew our system of institutional checks and balances, keep private interests private and public interests public, strengthen the separation of church and state, foster liberal education, free thought, and the renewal of civic/political ethics, etc.
For any of this to have any possibility of being realized, it might need to be constructed—after a sound Repunklikkkan thrashing at the polls—under a younger, more visionary set of leaders who are more attuned to the future and who replace the present bunch of resentful white elitists clinging for dear life to a past that never really existed. trump will die. So will our generation. Free of us, the world may be better off.
Leaders like the women of the Squad, like Mayor Pete, smart young folks who run for local and state offices—I don't know what may still be possible after trump, Holly--probably no one knows—but we’ve survived two world wars which culminated in Auschwitz and atomic fireballs, we survived the Gilded Age, robber barons, the Great Depression, we contentiously survived institutionalized slavery, a rash of 1960s assassinations, and lots more.
These historical phenomena, our lived lives and their referents, yours and mine, exist in a different register, on a different plane, than the complex paradigms the world now confronts—globalism, technology, mass displacement, pandemics, lost community, deaths of despair—Still, something will develop and so I’m guessing we will probably come out on the other side of the current interregnum with promise and possibility and creative energy—all out of nothing except sheer necessity.
For all our faults—past, present, future—the world needs us to save ourselves.
Or not. Things are in flux. And some things cant be known ahead of time. Will Europe become a new United States? Will the world’s remaining democracies unite to take a stand against the trappings of authoritarian oligarchy?
If we do fail to save ourselves, eventually still, some person somewhere will dissent, will act, and after a period of abandoned hope, a new and wiser set of free-thinkers will dream their own dream of what’s to be.
Perhaps most simply (given the violent winds and intensifying tremors of global warming), the earth itself will rise against us and the human drive toward civilization will have to start its long arduous climb once more, from scratch as it were.
In the meantime, however, we love our babies, continue to cherish our nation’s ideals, occasionally witness nature’s sublime, and from time to time even align ourselves with whatever’s divine about us. These are the days of our lives, and it may be that these are the same lived days which themselves will save us.
It’s hard to make sense of it all, no? God bless you Holly. [God bless you, Claire] God bless us all.
I see scenario 2 - paralysis as most likely. My reasoning is that Trump's approval is declining. As one pundit said recently, it feels like Biden and Afghanistan. After his numbers dropped into the 30s, they never really recovered. The damage Trump is doing to Americans is only going to become more clear - he's not going to reverse HIS tariffs that he's been touting since the 1980s - so his numbers aren't going to improve.
Further, if his numbers drop into the 30s, the 9 House Republicans in toss-up races (see https://www.cookpolitical.com/ratings/house-race-ratings) are going to drop their loyalty to him. Their loyalty is to getting reelected.
Re the cult of personality around Obama: First of all, Trumpers fit the definition of cult of personality: an idealized and heroic image of a glorious leader, often through unquestioning flattery and praise . . . developed through techniques such as the manipulation of the mass media, the dissemination of propaganda, the staging of spectacles, the manipulation of the arts, the instilling of patriotism . . ." (Wikipedia).
But this is not the characterization of Obama supporters. Obama was treated more like a rockstar than a cult leader. Maybe there were some creepily devoted fans, but none of the Dems I knew were among them. To quote Left Libertarian danielbgoo on Reddit, none of Obama's supporters believed "he was going to pull off miracles like spontaneous healing or bringing JFK Jr. back from the dead." We could actually see he was intelligent, well read and could think clearly enough that he could write, which of course appealed to the college grads who dominated Dem politics. What we believed that turned out to be wrong was that his win would introduce the post-racial world. We didn't realize that there is always white backlash to racial progress.
Further, many Dems were disappointed by his inability to use the bully pulpit to get Americans behind the Affordable Care Act and to build relationships with House and Senate members because of his aversion to that kind of politicking. On the contrary, in Trump's cult, there is NO criticism of Dear Leader.
So I don't think it is fair to characterize Obama's supporters as members of a cult. However, to say his charismatic appeal foreshadowed Trump's is. But you don't need the "cult of personality" dig at Obama to make that point. You can just acknowledge he was charismatic.
Fair enough.
According to someone like Leonord Zeskind ("Blood and Politics") there would be no cause for surprise. White nationalism was always in the mainstream, there's a direct line from David Duke of the KKK through Pat Buchanan to Donald Trump; white supremacists reacted to the defeat they saw in civil rights reforms of the 1960s by remaking themselves as anti-immigrant zealots. Race was always the indigestible ingredient in America's supposed "melting pot" - as it moved through three centuries of race war to expel and exterminate the original inhabitants of the land, taking their land and resources and exploited the captive labor of black slaves to build the empire of cotton and the basis of American capitalism. Inequality and domination were the crucial aspects of racial separation, but also of the millionaires of the Gilded Age and the new barons thrown up by advances in the first decades of the 20th century. Liberal America or progressive America was beaten down for a long time, whether in the Popular Party of the late 19th century or by Andrew Mellon's hard money policies in Herbert Hoover's presidency. As for religious fundamentalism, that again was not new to America, but part of its very founding, from the fanaticism of the Puritans awaiting the end of the world, through the Great Awakening, to the various sects and cults foretelling the rapture or new prophecies by home-grown prophets in the 19th century, and the mass movements using radio and TV of the 20th and 21st centuries. Many Americans were never comfortable with science or a secular view of the world, explanations not from ancient Middle Eastern myths of origins, evolution, kinship with primates rather than angels.
FDR's New Deal and the traumas of the Great Depression, along with the mobilization and unity brought by WW2 helped the less privileged, reduced social and economic inequality, and the consensus was not quite undone even by Republican administrations until the 1980s. From Ronald Reagan, the great roll-back began, and inequality grew again, to take monstrous proportions. It was not difficult to find a suitable greedy and vicious but charismatic politician to whom to link the
aspirations of billionaires to overthrow democracy, destroy what remained of social democracy, and
give full expression to ethnic nationalism. In this view of the world, looting and exploitation would
only be normal, and hence acceptable whether in Putin's Russia or Xi's China, along with nationalist
and imperialist expansion and resource grabs. That's America today.
What will America become? That's a hard question - the situation is unstable and may not lead to a cementing of an autocracy for purely circumstantial reasons. Trump is old at 79, much older than Putin and Erdogan when they hit their prime and began to consolidate power. The Project 2025 "shock and awe" campaign took full aim at the professional civil service and the structures of government, the liberal bastions of universities and free expression in media, the courts, and mobilized the MAGA foot-soldiers with deliberate displays of gratuitous cruelty in deportations. Yet this combination of taking the bread from the mouths of the poor through spending cuts and consolidating the power of billionaires and a criminal presidency is not sound. Destroying the capacity of the state to raise revenues will only increase chaos and anarchy. Popular discontent is unpredictable. America still doesn't have China's capacity to put a tight lid on dissent - it doesn't have 600 million security monitors around the country or a ministry of the interior monitoring the internet. Right-wing vigilante mobs are limited in effectiveness. With better organization and leadership, the tyranny could still be overthrown.
I am aware of this history. But it exists in a context broader than just white supremacism. Two more recent books, both by historians, were published in 2024, so they account for the Trump win in 2016 and nomination in 2024: "Illiberal America: A History" by Steven Hahn and "Rebellion: How Antiliberalism Is Tearing America Apart—Again" by Robert Kagan. Certainly since the Anti-Federalists, we've been a more or less divided country except for FDR's 3 ½ terms, when conditions were at their worst.
But I don't think that history necessarily leads directly to Trump because none of the other illiberals in our history ever made it to the White House. He was unique in exploiting the white backlash after Obama's win in 2008 and winning the White House because of two factors that never existed in the political environments where illiberal like David Duke ran for president. One is social media. The other is he was a TV celebrity.
Agreed, there's a broader context. Thanks for pointing that out. I also agree history does not mean the inevitability of Trump as president once or for a second term. That's like saying (which is true) Germany's prior history and the deep roots of antisemitism didn't mean the inevitability of Hitler or the Holocaust. There is always an interplay of trends and circumstances. Probabilities of some outcomes are cumulative, but there's a a random element. Donald Trump's charisma is real; his TV persona was manufactured, but it helped. He was a man for a certain time - but also, as you note, the reaction to Obama was present and powerful. The rise of the IT billionaires was not obvious ex ante. The role of Russia was at least an additional factor in the rise of Trump - not least through Russian oligarchs' and mafia money of more than a billion dollars (according to Craig Unger's documented history) washing through his real estate investments, and much of the permeable Republican Party taking Russian money. In addition, the 2016 election saw Russian state-sponsored hacking and dark propaganda in collaboration with right-wing American activists, focused interventions using the Mercer apparatus in swing states. Finally, the take-over of the Supreme Court was not predictable, but testified to the power of dark money lobbies and Republican manipulation of institutions and processes (McConnell's tactics, Obama's "gentlemanly" staying above the fray, etc.)
Were there self-inflicted wounds of Democrats? Almost certainly, according to most people. The volatility of the theme of immigration was not a secret after Trump had exploited it, in reacting towards more humane approaches, opening the southern border for three years, together with Republican blocking of a bipartisan immigration bill, provided more fuel to the Trump fire. The slow and relatively ineffective process of holding Trump to account for leading a failed coup in January 2021 only gave time for the false narrative to spread of the stolen election, and for Trump to consolidate his hold on the Republican Party and the MAGA foot-soldiers.
There are more analyses in depth of the transformation of the Republican Party into an extreme right-wing insurgency - or as many would now say, a cult led by a criminal in search of only power and money. On strongmen, as you are probably aware, Ruth Ben-Ghiat is very good. Here's her view of the current situation in an excellent interview with Prospect (U.K.):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUMATTj3Ai0
I am aware of Ruth. All those other factors are at play, but not unique to the Trump era, specifically Russian attempts to divide Americans. That’s been going on since the Cold War began. White backlash is also not unique. But I think him being a TV celebrity and his Twitter-based campaign are. Your thoughts?
It's not that "all those other factors" were unique, but for various reasons played a more important role in the rise of Trump. Some of those reasons you have mentioned - the reaction to Obama's presidency, for instance, which gave a boost to white nationalism to "take back" the country, an old reactionary project. Also, while there had been Soviet attempts to influence elections in the Cold War, there's no precedent for an American presidential candidate who was plausibly a Russian asset, rescued from bankruptcy by Russian money, parroting talking points (including the Birther Scandal) from the propaganda channel of America's main adversary, Russia Today. The Republican Party's earlier nominating procedures wouldn't have given a free pass to a candidate like Trump.
As for the role of TV and Twitter in establishing his (brand) image and building and consolidating Trump's base, by all means, they were very important. For what it's worth, if radio gave the world Mussolini and Hitler, it also gave it Churchill and FDR. Would they have been who they were without the media? No. Trump without TV or Twitter? Also, no. The times and the history and the society mesh with the personality, media are the bridge through which the personality builds a myth and a rhetoric, a following and leadership, crafts a new reality for followers. As a German who attended one of Hitler's rallies remembered, there was a wave of emotion, an electric rapture which caught up the audience - and although he knew personally that the content of the speech was rubbish, he was moved by the emotion himself.
You may like these articles:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-reality-tv-helps-explain-trumps-success/
https://www.annenbergpublicpolicycenter.org/the-politics-of-entertainment-media-how-the-apprentice-helped-trump-in-2016/
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/11/7/20920933/donald-trump-television-james-poniewozik
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20170119-how-trump-became-a-tv-star-before-the-apprentice
https://www.cleveland.com/open/2021/01/new-study-examines-how-donald-trump-used-twitter-to-craft-an-alternate-reality-for-his-followers.html
Thx. Will read them@
See also this link on media in the French Revolution - media always mattered! Those days people read pamphlets and newspapers; there were a huge number of printed images, songs, satires, special festivals and carnivals (e.g. the Festivals of the Federation, of Reason, and of the Supreme Being).
https://www.ieg-ego.eu/en/threads/european-media/european-media-events/rolf-reichardt-the-french-revolution-as-a-european-media-event
Of course, you're welcome.
Claire, what is this statement based on? "(T)he other half (of the American public), it seems to me, is only weakly committed to the legal-rational state, and to the extent it is, it is more because our rules and laws are traditional than because they still believe in them"? My reading of the public's support of legal-rational due process is that it is not weak, but strong.
Here is some data to support that: "(A) strong majority of voters, including majorities across party lines, believe that immigrants with green cards and visas should have the right to be informed of the charges against them (81%), the right to a fair trial (77%), the right to present a defense (75%), and the right to appeal a court decision (69%).
"(A) majority of Democrats (83%) and Independents (59%), believe that 'the federal government should only be allowed to deport undocumented immigrants if it has provided evidence and a hearing,' while 39% of voters believe 'the federal government should be allowed to deport undocumented immigrants without providing evidence and a hearing" (https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2025/4/15/voters-think-legal-residents-and-undocumented-immigrants-should-have-due-process).
That's more than half of the public, and it doesn't look weak to me. Also, it is not half who "attached itself to Donald Trump and legitimizes what he does by virtue of his charisma", it is around a third.
What I had in mind, when I wrote that, specifically, is the fact that Trump staged an insurrection against the United States and was not only not imprisoned, but allowed to run for office again. You could say that this is Merrick Garland's fault (and that would be true in a significant sense), but most Americans accepted this as somehow normal. Biden didn't fire Garland. The general sentiment, I think, was that it was too dangerous to apply the law to Trump--the problem would have to be settled at the ballot box. If we still had a more-than-weak attachment to our laws and our Constitution, Trump would long ago have been behind bars.
Thx for your reply. What do you mean by too dangerous - that violence would occur? I thought the danger was political, meaning being perceived as going against their predecessor, so they investigated as they do a mob boss, from the bottom up, starting with the rioters. Rather than a weak attachment to our laws, many legal analysts I follow saw it as a mis-reading of the political moment, that this was normal times.
Yes, I think that's what Garland was thinking: it was too dangerous because it would lead to violence. I don't believe the story that they were just starting from the bottom, business-as-usual style. I don't believe they could have failed to recognize that Trump was a profound threat to the Republic--and a dangerous criminal who needed to be behind bars. I think they lacked the courage to apply the law.
And it's not enough to express support for something in a poll. The degree to which you'll *defend* that thing represents the value you place on it. Most Americans have accepted Trump's lawlessness. There are scattered protests, but mostly organized by the far-left. We're not seeing the kind of overwhelming mass movement that would be required to interrupt the trajectory we're on. I don't imagine we will, either: See my comment, above, about the depoliticization of the American public.
Fair enough about polls. Agree about who's organizing the street protests, but I don't know about who's participating in them - how many are the swing state Trump voters, Independents and educated, suburban Rs? Same with the town hall protests. I don't know the makeup of the participants. Are they just Dems?
And I don't think the overwhelming mass movement to stop the trajectory is the goal. I think the only feasible goal, as I understand it from Sarah Longwell, is the Dems to take the House in the midterms, which only disrupts the trajectory.
According to the Cook Political Report, there are 9 toss-up races held by Rs. If his approval rating drops into the 30s, look for those 9 to begin straying from their loyalty to Trump, and the R candidates in the 10 toss-up races held by Ds struggle to define themselves as Republicans. Approval ratings are pretty good predictors. The difference between the Rs bailing on Nixon in '74 and their loyalty to Trump today is the approval rating. Nixon's went below 30 when Goldwater et.al. told Nixon to resign, lest he become impeached.