Tis the time’s plague when madmen lead the blind.

King Lear

Those who are most asleep think they are most awake, being under the power of vivid and fixed visions, so that those who are most ignorant think they know the most.

Theodotus (2nd century C.E.)

The dizzying pace of Trump’s rampage through the tattered hallways of American precedent continues. The Walmart Price-Fixer-in-Chief can wreak havoc from anywhere on the map, as long as he has his thumbs and a fully-charged phone (I wonder how many phones he goes through a month?). His escalating flouting of the Constitution, and the desperate attempts of various institutions to resist the onslaught, are so ubiquitous that even his fans are likely experiencing advanced TFS (Trump Fatigue Syndrome).

But someday, hopefully sooner rather than later, Trump will be out of office. And eventually, he will pass on to the great Mar-a-Lago in the sky (or the ground, as it were), and the pitchfork will pass to the next iteration of our budding demagogic theocracy. It is this post-Trump future that really concerns me these days. Not that the damage he’s doing now isn’t serious, and not that we shouldn’t resist his offenses with every last breath. But in the longer term, what kind of pathway will Trump’s successors and supporters follow? How will they parlay all the groundwork of the current administration into concrete reality? Is that even possible?

With that in mind, let’s look at the rough future that Trumpism is foreshadowing.

Trumptopia

Trumpists are increasingly living inside a madman’s fever-dream, one that defines itself more about what is hated than what is loved. It’s about what you ain’t: woke, liberal, Marxist, radical left, whatever. But on the positive side (positive meaning “actually existing,” not “good”), what do Trumpists actually expect life to be like, once all the current policies really take hold and start shaping the nation in toto? And how do those expectations match up with reality?

Let’s start with the tariff smokescreen. Trump himself doesn’t really care if the tariffs take years to work their magic. He is already rich, and getting richer by the day, thanks to the emolument-palooza rolling in from all sources, foreign and domestic. And he probably doesn’t even want the tariffs to work too fast anyway, as he can use the midstream-horse excuse to lay the groundwork for a third term. In the meantime, unfortunately, everybody starves. But even if, many years down the road, tariffs somehow result in the massive re-nationalization of industrial capacity, the distribution of the rewards from that shift will take the same shape as everything else in the current economy: that is, the 1% will reap a huge windfall, and the rest of us will get the table crumbs. This analysis also raises the pertinent question: What is the bigger injustice? Trade imbalances between countries, or the historically-unjust distribution of wealth inside the United States right now?

The other big building block of Trumpism is mass deportation, which, as predicted, is being carried out in a heartless, reckless manner. No due process, Judges being arrested. Citizens being kidnapped off the street. Hard-working people keeping their heads down being snatched up, instead of the criminals that were the supposed original targets. Extraordinary rendition to hellish foreign prisons. It is basically the shitshow that we libs warned about. And what will it actually accomplish? Will we see a massive decrease in crime? No chance. Will millions of jobs open up, jobs with great wages and benefits? Forget it. Will government finances thrive, with all the fraud associated with “illegals” saving us billions? Again, nope. Every study under the sun makes clear that immigration (legal and extra-legal) is not a major cause of crime, fraud, or wage depression. Rather, even undocumented immigrants are net positives for the economy, bringing in more tax revenue than goes out. And as noted a million times, middle-aged white people ain’t gonna be flocking to pick strawberries, clean rich people’s houses, and take up back-breaking construction work.

How about anti-abortion laws, trad-wifery, baby bonuses, and the host of other initiatives to re-ignite good old Christian family values? Will these things fix the white birth-rate “crisis” and reverse the dreaded Great Replacement? Again, it just will not happen, especially when nothing else is actually being done to support families and solve their real-life problems. If you want people to have more kids (which, by the way, I don’t), then you have to actually put things in place that will help parents raise those kids, things like universal health care, mandated paid maternity and paternity leave, a living wage, daycare assistance, etc. Without solving the economic challenges to parenthood, all the cultural pro-family claptrap is just so much noise.

So the future Trumptopia is a delusional fantasyland, where:

• 40-somethings become factory workers, gardeners, elder caregivers, domestic help, and construction workers, all with amazing wages and benefits.
• Borders are hermetically-sealed, with no polluting foreign DNA coming into our big, beautiful, increasingly-white gene pool. (plus, border guards and ICE could be another awesome source of jobs!)
• All history of struggle, oppression, and injustice is erased, for women and minority groups. DEI is forever-banished, because it is based on soft, ineffectual, feminine virtues, not the kind of things we need for a muscular, America-first mindset. (plus, the financial precariousness of life for the non-rich really doesn’t provide any economic space for redressing the wrongs of the past anyway. So why dwell on it?)
• Young whites start pumping out babies at a prodigious pace, because of all the amazing jobs created in the first bullet above.

The Font of Illusion

Trumpism is part of a global shift to the right, where dictators, theocrats, strongmen, and neo-fascists thrive. These movements grow in the interstices of crumbling institutions and norms, destruction that has been meted out not by wokism, or Marxism, or liberalism, but by capitalism itself. Many thinkers like to blame “neoliberalism” for our troubles, but that is just hedging. It is capitalism itself that gave rise to the specific version we call neoliberalism, and there is no getting around the need to directly confront the failure of capitalism as a system.

Right wing movements like Trumpism, by their very nature, cannot build anything new. They can only destroy what exists, in pursuit of a mirage from the past, a fleeting dream that can never be caught. The America-First-ism of Trump is the delusional phantasm that we can be insulated from the collapse of the world system by pursing the empty hallucinations of racial, ethnic, economic, and theological purity.

There is a growing global sense that the whole human project might be going down. Even countries that are doing relatively well (think Scandinavia) are incessantly reminded that massive international inequality still exists, that the planet is warming, that the oceans are dying, that our fellow species are being snuffed out forever, and that accelerating flows of economic, political, and ecological refugees are swamping advanced countries’ ability to deal with the influx, which then ignites right-wing extremism.

In essence, the collapse of global industrial capitalism has rendered the old amalgamation of institutions unable to meet the present moment. In the face of ecological collapse, economic inequality, political polarization, and the atrophy of labor-value, the desperate attempts to resuscitate the post-war conditions of yore will just not work. Even if these attempts look constructive on the surface, they do little except give the appearance of life, like a brain-dead patient being kept alive by artificial respiration. But nothing can revive the rattling corpse of the old system. Trumpism and its liberal alternatives can only create a zombie-future, the dead walking.

Instead

In a way, Trumpism is serving one potentially-positive function: it is perhaps priming the people for broad, sweeping change, change that more accurately captures the growing public sentiment that the old order has failed, and that something else has to be built in its place. But instead of chasing the ghosts of the past, we need to be crafting a radically-different future, one that can actually exist in our deteriorating conditions of polycrisis. Many earlier posts on this blog detail what that future could look like. Check out the Moonshot posts for the most recent telling of that tale (Part 1 is here).