The Decline and Fall of the Trump Regime? Already?

From Timothy Burke from 8 by 7: I

’m on record as finding the whole debate about whether what is happening right now in the United States is fascism or conservatism or totalitarianism and so on as being fundamentally uninteresting, for roughly the same reason that I think squabbling about whether bombardment that is indifferent to civilians is genocide or not. You have to start with the basics: what is happening now is bad. What is happening now is worse. What is happening now seems likely to become even worse than worse.

So if there is any position I disdain it is that this moment in America, in the Levant, in the world, is just par for the course, nothing new under the sun, a continuation of a status quo.

What I am trying to evaluate now is not the comprehensive badness of the past year and the almost certainly comprehensive worse-ness of the year to come, but what is new here. Like most historians, I’ve been busy reaching for analogies, in part to just try and get everybody who is “waiting to see whether this is that bad” that it’s very bad. But analogies always fail when it comes to seeing what’s new.

Right now, there are two things that I think are new. The first is that the intensity of Trumpism at the heart of a major global power that has so powerfully shaped the last century really seems like the death-knell of neoliberalism. Among other things, it’s revealing just how much the Democratic Party was intertwined with neoliberalism and the extent to which that is limiting its ability to serve as a meaningful opposition going forward. I don’t say this in the conventional sense of tossing off “neoliberalism” as an invective for all the things I don’t like. Perhaps not unlike many Democrats, I’d frankly prefer neoliberalism to Trumpism in part because I could imagine ways to move forward from neoliberalism to a better society without a disastrous collapse in between. The regulatory and managerial apparatus that neoliberalism rested upon is being completely demolished. That’s really different than in many cases of 20th Century authoritarianism that were either a strong reaction to social democracy or socialism or the threat thereof or were an outcome of a militarized elite seizing power in a state with very weak capacity and underdeveloped political institutions.

This point leads to the second new wrinkle, which is more consequential. Right now Musk and his gang of teenage burglars are destroying the capacity of the federal state in a more or less indiscriminate way. I’m almost starting to believe that they might even blast their way through the Pentagon, though that seems unlikely in comparison to everything else. They’re doing that without the kind of long-standing economic crisis that someone like Javier Milei in Argentina has used for his justification. They’re not just radically cutting spending, they’re decomposing vast infrastructures of government, regulation and management that allowed the federal state to project its presence and authority while also holding up the national economy through direct and indirect subsidies.

A lot of the motive here from the Bannonite wing of Trumpism seems to be hurting educated professionals as much as possible, whereas on the Muskian side, it seems to be annihilating the regulatory state. But what happens when they’ve finished demolishing the government entirely?

They’ve already discovered that they can’t easily restore capacity when it turns out they blew up something of vital and immediate importance like the workforce attending to the nuclear arsenal and the maintenance of dangerous waste sites connected to nuclear weapons.

I think they’re going to find that if they were hoping to direct future contracts to their own businesses or the businesses of allies, they might have accidentally trashed the basic mechanisms for awarding contracts, signing contracts, and having the security of contract for the bottom-line of the contracting party. Even if Musk’s little gopher squad have established cut-outs that let them illegally drain money from the Treasury to deposit in a bank account for SpaceX, that’s not anything like a sustainable pipeline for long-term corruption. If they were hoping to find ways to create a new client elite, they’ve already destroyed a lot of what they might offer to people willing to bend the knee and take a lifetime job in an authoritarian bureaucracy.

Perhaps more startling from the vantage point of the analogies already in play, it’s no longer clear to me how they’re going to govern at all from Washington. They had a vast warehouse full of carrots and they’ve dumped gasoline and a match on most of them already. They have a fair number of sticks, but that’s not enough to hold practical authority over a nation this big and (formerly) wealthy—assuming the sticks even agree to be used in such a manner. They’re even getting rid of prosecutors, FBI agents, IRS agents and others who would have known how to be sticks if they were tasked with doing so. It’s one thing for small authoritarian states with a long history of casualized abuse of power to just murder, torture and imprison anybody who looks the wrong way at them and another to do that in the U.S. This is not to say that they won’t be trying very soon to act in precisely that way, but they’ve already cut into their own capacity for doing so.

That’s what seems different. I can’t really think of a state with a tremendous amount of power that has turned in a sharply authoritarian direction and elected to voluntarily cripple itself. I can think of states that have done that by accident because they were so incompetent and corrupt, but that also was often a move from a weak semi-democratic state to a weak authoritarian one, not a move from the most powerful country on the planet deliberately destroying its own power for reasons of ideological purity. (Though corruption and incompetence are of course part of the mix as well.) In an odd way, this might be one source of hope in this dark moment. If a number of state governments retain their authority and administrative coherence, they might be able to capitalize on the retreating tide of federal power. If Trump is going to ignore the courts, even the Supreme Court, then state governors and legislatures might feel empowered to do the same while buoying up what the federal government is trying to sink and ignoring any commands from Washington to the contrary. In a year that is already overflowing with constitutional crises, that move would just be one more stone on a towering pile. Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more The News: Yes, It's True. Wednesday's Child Is Full of Woe Timothy Burke Feb 19 READ IN APP I’m on record as finding the whole debate about whether what is happening right now in the United States is fascism or conservatism or totalitarianism and so on as being fundamentally uninteresting, for roughly the same reason that I think squabbling about whether bombardment that is indifferent to civilians is genocide or not. You have to start with the basics: what is happening now is bad. What is happening now is worse. What is happening now seems likely to become even worse than worse.

So if there is any position I disdain it is that this moment in America, in the Levant, in the world, is just par for the course, nothing new under the sun, a continuation of a status quo.

What I am trying to evaluate now is not the comprehensive badness of the past year and the almost certainly comprehensive worse-ness of the year to come, but what is new here. Like most historians, I’ve been busy reaching for analogies, in part to just try and get everybody who is “waiting to see whether this is that bad” that it’s very bad. But analogies always fail when it comes to seeing what’s new.

Right now, there are two things that I think are new. The first is that the intensity of Trumpism at the heart of a major global power that has so powerfully shaped the last century really seems like the death-knell of neoliberalism. Among other things, it’s revealing just how much the Democratic Party was intertwined with neoliberalism and the extent to which that is limiting its ability to serve as a meaningful opposition going forward. I don’t say this in the conventional sense of tossing off “neoliberalism” as an invective for all the things I don’t like. Perhaps not unlike many Democrats, I’d frankly prefer neoliberalism to Trumpism in part because I could imagine ways to move forward from neoliberalism to a better society without a disastrous collapse in between. The regulatory and managerial apparatus that neoliberalism rested upon is being completely demolished.

That’s really different than in many cases of 20th Century authoritarianism that were either a strong reaction to social democracy or socialism or the threat thereof or were an outcome of a militarized elite seizing power in a state with very weak capacity and underdeveloped political institutions. This point leads to the second new wrinkle, which is more consequential. Right now Musk and his gang of teenage burglars are destroying the capacity of the federal state in a more or less indiscriminate way. I’m almost starting to believe that they might even blast their way through the Pentagon, though that seems unlikely in comparison to everything else. They’re doing that without the kind of long-standing economic crisis that someone like Javier Milei in Argentina has used for his justification. They’re not just radically cutting spending, they’re decomposing vast infrastructures of government, regulation and management that allowed the federal state to project its presence and authority while also holding up the national economy through direct and indirect subsidies.

A lot of the motive here from the Bannonite wing of Trumpism seems to be hurting educated professionals as much as possible, whereas on the Muskian side, it seems to be annihilating the regulatory state. But what happens when they’ve finished demolishing the government entirely?

They’ve already discovered that they can’t easily restore capacity when it turns out they blew up something of vital and immediate importance like the workforce attending to the nuclear arsenal and the maintenance of dangerous waste sites connected to nuclear wea

I think they’re going to find that if they were hoping to direct future contracts to their own businesses or the businesses of allies, they might have accidentally trashed the basic mechanisms for awarding contracts, signing contracts, and having the security of contract for the bottom-line of the contracting party. Even if Musk’s little gopher squad have established cut-outs that let them illegally drain money from the Treasury to deposit in a bank account for SpaceX, that’s not anything like a sustainable pipeline for long-term corruption. If they were hoping to find ways to create a new client elite, they’ve already destroyed a lot of what they might offer to people willing to bend the knee and take a lifetime job in an authoritarian bureaucracy. Perhaps more startling from the vantage point of the analogies already in play, it’s no longer clear to me how they’re going to govern at all from Washington. They had a vast warehouse full of carrots and they’ve dumped gasoline and a match on most of them already. They have a fair number of sticks, but that’s not enough to hold practical authority over a nation this big and (formerly) wealthy—assuming the sticks even agree to be used in such a manner. They’re even getting rid of prosecutors, FBI agents, IRS agents and others who would have known how to be sticks if they were tasked with doing so. It’s one thing for small authoritarian states with a long history of casualized abuse of power to just murder, torture and imprison anybody who looks the wrong way at them and another to do that in the U.S. This is not to say that they won’t be trying very soon to act in precisely that way, but they’ve already cut into their own capacity for doing so.

That’s what seems different. I can’t really think of a state with a tremendous amount of power that has turned in a sharply authoritarian direction and elected to voluntarily cripple itself. I can think of states that have done that by accident because they were so incompetent and corrupt, but that also was often a move from a weak semi-democratic state to a weak authoritarian one, not a move from the most powerful country on the planet deliberately destroying its own power for reasons of ideological purity. (Though corruption and incompetence are of course part of the mix as well.)

In an odd way, this might be one source of hope in this dark moment. If a number of state governments retain their authority and administrative coherence, they might be able to capitalize on the retreating tide of federal power. If Trump is going to ignore the courts, even the Supreme Court, then state governors and legislatures might feel empowered to do the same while buoying up what the federal government is trying to sink and ignoring any commands from Washington to the contrary. In a year that is already overflowing with constitutional crises, that move would just be one more stone on a towering pile.

That would be a way to make the point about why authoritarians have hitherto elected not to void their own power, real and potential. When you’re setting yourself up as a tyrant, you generally expect to have to project your power ubiquitously rather than in capricious and enfeebled ways, to dispense benefits as well as punishments, to tie people to you in ways they will be reluctant to sever. We may need a new word meaning “dictatorship whose first move is to achieve dicklessness” to describe the system that Musk and Trump are trying to create right now. That would be a way to make the point about why authoritarians have hitherto elected not to void their own power, real and potential. When you’re setting yourself up as a tyrant, you generally expect to have to project your power ubiquitously rather than in capricious and enfeebled ways, to dispense benefits as well as punishments, to tie people to you in ways they will be reluctant to sever. We may need a new word meaning “dictatorship whose first move is to achieve dicklessness” to describe the system that Musk and Trump are trying to create right now.