The Dual Nature of the Trump Catastrophe
We have an opportunity to define a new future
Those of us on the progressive-liberal side of the American political equation have long wished for a way to change the system within which we live. We see the unfairness, the concentration of power and wealth, and the destruction of our communities from capitalism. We have argued for regulations to protect natural systems, support the disadvantaged, and bring about a resurgence of justice. Yet we have seen these efforts fall on their faces in terms of effectiveness. These experiences have led many to believe that the system is broken and we need a new system. In 2016, this actually led many far left political thinkers—many of whom would have supported Bernie Sanders—to toy with and even cross over to vote for Trump. To them, Hilary Clinton just looked like the same old system at play.
By this time in Trump’s second term, it is obvious that he is an agent of destruction. The so-called “deep state” is a euphemism for the institutions of American democracy. Everyone who is paying attention knows the litany of actions the administration is taking to undercut those institutions. At the time of this writing, they are attempting to show a modicum of decorum with regard to the judiciary—a decorum that will last only as long as rulings of the Supreme Court go their way. Trump is exercising the power of the unitary executive, a term that gained huge favor during the years of President George W. Bush and opened us up to this episode with Trump, as I outlined in my 2006 book Call to Liberty. Trump is just a lot more caustic and destructive that Bush was, but the power came from Bush.
The Progressive Dream
The progressive dream against capitalism has always been to undo the system. From the Luddites to the Marxists to Bernie Sanders, the idea has been that real change cannot happen without core changes to the system. Some have talked of replacing capitalism while others speak of the disintegration of patriarchy. Some have decried the rise of corporate power while others witness the indoctrination into capitalist ideology that is the core of the education system.
As I said in a little piece called the Postcapitalist Manifesto:
“Virtually everyone on the cutting edge of social change has dreamt of this time. This is our moment to fix the systemic injustices, exploitations, violence, and hierarchy that plague society. Whether your focus is racial injustice, labor equity, sexual identity, poverty, climate change, feminism, sustainable land use, or indigenous culture, the dream has been to change the system. Well, “the system” is called capitalism, and we stand on the threshold of a dramatic, historic transformation.
“The driving force in this change is surprising. It is not socialism or communism. It is not religion and its moral concerns. It is not even our global political structures. Rather, this once-a-millennium opportunity is being driven by capitalism itself and its relentless pursuit of digitalization. As I will show, the pursuit of digitalization will cause markets to malfunction, labor to become valueless, and investment to become meaningless. The logic of capitalism will stop working. This has never occurred before, and because of it, we have the opportunity to shape the future as no generation since the Renaissance.
“But there is NO GUARANTEE!”
It is in this context that the rise of Trumpism was almost predictable, and on two fronts—first, as the chief destroyer of the patriarchal order. I know that it looks like he is reinforcing patriarchy with his embrace of oligarchs, strong man dictators, and the like. Those embraces, however, are also destroying the infrastructure of the core patriarchy in America. After all, the institutions of democracy are also the institutions of patriarchy. To create the kingship of which he and his right wing pals dream of, the DEI-based gutting of the civil service is required. So, too, the alliances and trade relationships with the world. (Few remember, for example, that Bernie Sanders was also a huge critic of global trade deals.) Many see the medical system as the ultimate form of patriarchy and unfair wealth absorption, where people who get sick are bankrupted to the benefit of the established medical practitioners and institutions. And on and on it goes. A total change to the system will require this kind of dismantling, and it is no coincidence that just as digitalization is erupting into the new AI era, an agent like Trump would appear to tear down the patriarchal structures that such digitalization cannot yet touch. It is a sweeping, energetic, universal, spirit-level process.
The second way Trumpism was almost predictable was this: Digitalization is undercutting and destabilizing everything. People feel that and it produces fear, especially in those who first get affected. Inevitably, in a patriarchal system those first affected are those at the lower end of the socio-economic system. They are the displaced workers, those who can’t find jobs, and those who find themselves without the power they once had or expected that they were going to have. The folks who most clearly meet this criteria are working class white men. Fear courses through that class as they desperately look for someone to blame, someone to hate, someone to bully, and someone to be on top of—all in a desperate attempt to hold on to their own sense of power. So it is no surprise, from that vantage point, that attacking anyone and everyone that seems to be getting ahead of them—especially women and blacks, but also gays, transgender people, undocumented immigrants, and anyone else who seems to be getting a fair shake but which feels disempowering to them—would become targets of rage and envy. The patriarchal system must respond. Trump, even as an agent of destruction, takes the torch to that system of equal rights so as to empower those who perceive that they lost power. There is no way it can play out as anything other than bigotry and sexism. If it wasn’t Trump, someone else would have arisen to fill that gap.
Destruction Leads to Two Potential Futures
What I am trying to point out here is that Trumpism is another revealing of the path of the destruction of patriarchal capitalism. The American traditions of democracy, after all, support the entire infrastructure of patriarchal capitalism, as well as those democratic norms and traditions. I would much prefer that the revolution against patriarchy could unfold in a more orderly manner, but it is not a surprise, from this point of view, that it is unfolding in this particular way. When I look at it this way, the horror is less in the current unfolding, but rather in two places that the future could take us.
The first future is that Trumpism seems hell bent on not just institutional destruction, but also on a cruel engagement with a fascist death spiral. It looks like the seeds are being planted for a kind of hateful purging and a so-called “final solution” against millions and millions of people. We see it now in the attacks on people who are transgender, immigrants, disabled, or working in civil service. Rhetoric has shown that it will continue, as it always does in this kind of paroxysm, against children and the elderly. And during the campaign, Trump promised to rid the country of “liberal vermin.” Do not doubt what he means. If you are liberal, he and his henchmen will soon be coming for you.
Second, those progressives and liberals who are on the left are woefully unprepared for this. We find ourselves defending the traditions of American democracy, and thereby patriarchy, at a time when they are indefensible. Who is rising among us? Bernie Sanders and AOC—with the same worn out ideas for socialism and a progressive wish list based on the defunct green new deal. Old ideas. The offer nothing that prepares us for the new future that can be coming, if only we will guide it into being. We have precious few truly new ideas. We have no guidance for how to manage AI except to create regulatory guardrails. We cannot handle digital currency except by suing, regulating, and jailing its purveyors. We have no idea how to handle robots. And decisively, we have no solutions for terrified workers and disempowered people, especially those white men who feel it so acutely, but also, those increasing numbers of black and Latino men who voted from Trump. My point is that old ideas and the defense of our traditions is a road to failure. If we stay there, the patriarchy will fall, as it must under this newly digitalized world. But instead of a glorious world of egalitarianism and happiness for nearly everyone, instead of eliminating scarcity and living in abundance, we will achieve a handing off of the biggest revolution in human history to the forces of darkness, domination, and control. A new patriarchy, nuclear powered and on steroids. Ultimately, it will be our lack of ability to embrace a new future that causes it. We don’t need to go down that road.
The Need for New Ideas
To grow this new world for ourselves and the generations to come, we need to start with new ideas and new perspectives on the world that are in alignment with the world we are coming into rather than the one we are coming from. As liberal progressives, we are at a strong disadvantage here. The right has been creating its ideas and honing them for decades. Some of the most extreme, and yet animating ideas, come from the far right libertarian view. It’s ideas go back to the Austrian School of Economics and a man named Leo Strauss which held sway in the 1930s and 1940s. Many years later, they gave way and were picked up the Chicago school led by Milton Friedman, among others. Around 2010, those ideas morphed once again into something called the Dark Enlightenment, which is essentially a neo-reactionary, neo-monarchist ideology. These people actually want a king! And they have created a whole school of thought around it, a school supported by people like Peter Theil and the so-called intellectuals at the Hoover Institute.
Likewise, from the 1950s through about 2015, another set of ideas developed in what many have known as the neoconservative movement. This group was well funded with its think tanks and intellectuals and was supported by many politicians and leaders, including Bush 2, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and others. Francis Fukuyama, William Buckley, and Bill Kristol have been champions. Many of these people in fact, were instrumental in the assertion of the idea of the unitary executive, which Trump is using today and guides several members of the Supreme Court. Bill Kristol may have turned away from Trump, but his ideas created Trump. Without these conservative, right wing, ideological ideas, there would be no Trump today. Ideas matter.
The other set of ideas animating our current situation are those dreams of the tech executives who moved from supporting Democrats to supporting Trump. Why did they do this? For one thing, they like the neo-monarchist idea because they imagine themselves to be that king. In fact, they have so much money and wealth at their disposal that they cannot imagine it any other way.
At the same time, all of them hold some version of the dream of a fully technocratic society—run by AI, utilizing functional robots, harnessing energy to create abundance, and the end of human work. We have heard it and seen it in the effort to create driverless cars, humanoids, AI, and more and more advanced robots. Musk and others have articulated this dream for many years. They dream of a metaverse—the reason behind Facebook’s name change to Meta—and of alternate realities. Digitalization of money as crypto is part of that picture, and we will see more and more places that it will unfold. These tech leaders saw their visions being dashed by Democrats who were beholden to the past ideas like regulation and they moved their lot to a man who, I presume, most of them still dislike but who would work for their interests in this dream.
Network as Metaphor; Network as Lens
The ideas liberals and progressives need to work on are those connected to the disruptions to capitalism that digitalization is producing. How do we find them? Let’s look at what is happening now.
Ever since Descartes, the western world has been driven by the imagination of the machine. We call it the mechanistic universe and it has become the lens through which we see everything in the world. From nature to our bodies to small farms, businesses, banking, government, and education and training, we think of everything as a machine—or as a more complex machine, which we call a system. So we have ecosystems, the economic system, business systems, training systems. We think of government as an inefficient system. Farms have inputs and outputs. Even our bodies are thought of as systems—immune system, circulatory system, central nervous system—often even with one state of illness being completely unrelated to another one because it doesn’t affect the same system.
This use of the “system” is an example of a dominant thought metaphor. It becomes so dominant that we use it to explain almost everything we see. It becomes that way because the dominant metaphor reveals aspects of the phenomena we are looking at that we could not see without that lens. It creates insights that people, organizations, or society find beneficial. But what gives it its unique power and dominance is that we are largely unaware we are even using it as a metaphor. We think the metaphor is reality. But really, it is just a useful metaphor. There are no literal cogs in an ecosystem, a training system, nor a business system. We just find it useful to think about it that way. In fact, we’ve been using it and seeing things this way for over 500 years. Clearly, new ideas are not going to come from that place.
With the rise of digitalization, a new metaphor has come to the fore, which will likely replace the machine as metaphor—or at least, to layer over the top and guide us in understanding the world in a new way. That new metaphor is the network. Networks will not save us and that are not some kind of panacea. Rather, just as the machine provided a lens on phenomena, the network provides a different lens. Machines have inputs, outputs, processes, cogs, and so on. Machines have power and offer control. Networks, on the other hand, have connections. Some people are more influential in a network than others, but there are no layers of control. Rather, you have self-created involvement. No hierarchy. Connections that go a very long way.
Given what we see in the world today, I can hear the objection: What about the control of social media networks like Facebook and X? It is true that levels of control are being exerted there, but those are mechanistic controls. They are patriarchal and capitalistic, an indication that social media is not a pure network. We are talking about network as metaphor. Machines did not need to be perfect to become effective lens on reality. Networks don’t need to be pure to function as a useful lens on reality either.
Now, consider what happens when a network can be applied as a lens to phenomena in the world. What happens if we look at nature as a network? What new insights do we get? How does nature look different when it appears to us as a network rather than as a machine? Does a food chain even makes sense anymore? Is there really a hierarchy—a core idea from the machine metaphor—that puts eagles and lions on top? How does our view of predation change if we look at plants and animals in this new way? Can we think of roots as networks rather than as “parts” that have a function? Do you see where this can go?
What happens when we apply networks as a metaphor to social phenomena? Economic phenomena? And so on? Back in the sixties and seventies, the machine-like nature of politics enabled former House Speaker Tip O’Neil to be able to declare “All politics are local.” That’s because there was a local hierarchy in the so-called machine politics of those days. Today, such a notion is absurd. Politics aren’t local, they are connected, and that makes them susceptible to influence from outside, in ways they never were before. Witness the fundraising for Congressional or even judicial races in various parts of the country where funds come from many places outside the area of jurisdiction or representation. This is network beginning to manifest, but still subject to domination by a waning patriarchy. It is just the beginning of a revolution in politics based on changes to our guiding metaphor. What could happen if the patriarchal was completely replaced by network viewpoints?
Let me take it one step further. Our traditional model of political democracy is of representational democracy. That I choose you to represent me means I have engaged a hierarchy—I have given you power. That is mechanistic thinking. If we allow for networks, a whole new opportunity appears. As I wrote in What Is Postcapitalism?
“But in postcapitalist politics, one possibility is that because people spend less time at work, they are more involved in self-government. Representatives become obsolete. Instead, people may vote far more regularly. As voting becomes electronic and digital, there is little reason why every issue, bill, or proposal can’t be put directly to the people. The whole idea of huge bills with stupid, irrelevant riders and hidden additions will become an anachronism—instead, we can vote on each granular issue. If there are government representatives, they will be charged with developing proposals to put to the people, not with making the decisions. Representative democracy could become obsolete, and self-government might become an actual reality.”
Do you see how thinking about networks can change our sense of possibility? Social machines require hierarchies like representative democracy. As networks become more ubiquitous, they overwhelm the sense of representation—or actually even usurp it. Our “representatives” are increasingly determined by outside influences leveraging networks for a mechanistic gain. As that happens, they feel and actually are, far less representative. When we try to defend the traditions of representative democracy, as most progressives are now doing, we are fighting against this flow of technology and the changing cultural metaphor. As such, we become anachronistic and increasingly irrelevant.
I can’t say that direct democracy is the keystone idea. Not at all. It is just an example of how we could use this new guiding metaphor to look at and understand our politics differently, and to see them as a way of engaging the future. “Progressive,” after all, if it means anything, usually means innovations on the future that lead to equity, justice, fairness, and opportunity for everyone. It has never meant fighting a read guard action to protect what we used to have.
Toward Shifting Perception
What I am trying to show here is an example of how we can see things differently when we use a different lens. If the lens is a machine, you will see everything mechanistically. If the lens is complex machines, you will see systems in everything. If your lens is hierarchy, you will see hierarchical structures through out the world. But what is just as important is what you do NOT see. You miss the network relationships between things, the egalitarian aspects of the relationships, and so on. Critics have complained for centuries about the soulless aspect of capitalism, which is to say, that a capitalistic, mechanistic lens can’t perceive soul and heart and impact on people. It is cold and calculating. There is much more that we are likely blinded to because of the lens we use from Descartes. The network lens will likely maintain our blindness to some things, but open our perceptions to a whole new world we could not see before. Call this a paradigm shift in the tradition of Thomas Kuhn if you like. Such shifts are valuable because of the new perceptions they open.
To bring it back to the dual nature of the Trump catastrophe, we must see him and his MAGA movement as a destructive, fascist force. There’s no question about that. He is destroying the traditions and norms of democracy, as well as its institutions. We may not be able to stop him, but we can get ready for the replacement and be the agents of that new world, rather than letting MAGA and the Dark Enlightenment define it. Our opportunity is now. It is time to embrace it.
Anthony Signorelli
You can get my book What Is Postcapitalism? here.
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