I always say, we have two enemies. We have the outside enemy, and then we have the enemy from within. And the enemy from within, in my opinion, is more dangerous than China, Russia, and all these countries. They’re Marxists and communists and fascists, and they’re sick. We have China, we have Russia, we have all these countries. If you have a smart president, they can all be handled. The more difficult are, you know, the Pelosis, these people, they’re so sick and they’re so evil.

Donald Trump, 2024

Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise, every expanded prospect.

James Madison

Of all the tyrannies that affect mankind, tyranny in religion is the worst.

Thomas Paine

It is not a comforting time to be a liberal in America. Fear over the expanding authoritarianism and fascism of Donald Trump and his Project 2025 stormtroopers is rising to soul-crushing levels for libs, and for good reason. On every front, Trump is dismantling our government and society: flouting the will of the courts; undermining Congress’s power of the purse and war-declaring function; engaging in off-cycle gerrymandering to tip the mid-terms (if we have them); open and illegal intimidation of LA and DC with federal troops; a cruel, quota-driven deportation agenda that rides roughshod over due process, habeas corpus, and actual citizenship status; defunding and suppression of science and economic expertise; bullying colleges and universities into betraying their mission to expand education for marginalized groups; threatening to arrest and jail a former president; etc. And not to mention the Epstein debacle, the ongoing genocide in Gaza, and the illegal Russian invasion and war with Ukraine, where all Trump seems to care about is which bloodthirsty tyrant shows the most strength (strength is right out of central casting, of course). Nowadays, a liberal’s breaking-news feed pings more often than score updates in the first round of March Madness. Not a good time to be a Dem, or, God forbid, a “progressive.”

Even at their most optimistic, liberals tend to talk about how long it will take to “undo the damage” and “rebuild our democratic institutions” after Trump is gone, but does that seem remotely possible in today’s political climate? Can one envision Democrats winning enough consecutive elections to actually fix anything, let alone everything? Because that’s what it would take to “undo the damage.” Dems would have to consistently and convincingly win election after election, to prevent the GOP from just re-scuttling and re-fucking everything. I just don’t see that happening in the current constellation of events. It seems more likely that we’ll get more of the same: pendulum swings from one party to the other, while nothing gets done in relation to the massive polycrisis of ecological, economic, and political collapse.

At this point, it’s worth recalling the origin and function of what I call the “Polarization Industrial Complex,” the whole array of media outlets, think tanks, electioneering businesses, and plutocratic power-players that manufacture and market polarized cultural and political rage, in order to keep regular people at each other’s throats instead of looking behind the curtains of oligarchy. The PIC was birthed in the mid to late 90s, as a reaction to Bill Clinton’s presidency. Clinton transformed the Democrats into a second party of big money, abandoning the working class for the seductions of the famed symbolic analysts of the new information and service economies. The GOP was thus forced to find another way to differentiate itself from the Dems, as they could no longer claim to be the only party for the rich. The answer was cultural demonization of liberals, spearheaded by the Three Horsemen of Polarization: Rupert Murdoch, Newt Gingrich, and Rush Limbaugh. Each of these men used their unique platforms to create a new social universe, where liberals were to blame for all the world’s evils, and a good conservative’s duty was to battle the libs at every turn. No compromise, no sympathy, no cooperation. An entire industry thus grew up around this approach to politics and culture. Conspiracy theories, anti-urban sentiment, evangelical anti-abortion fervor, latent and open racism, sexism, and homophobia — all these things were marshalled together and woven into a dualistic worldview, where the conservative agents of God battle the liberal minions of the devil.

The function of the PIC is to provide cover for plutocrats, so that the government and economy can continue to be operated for the benefit of the wealthy few, while regular people’s lives and livelihoods get ground down by the relentless profiteering and gouging of consumer capitalism. The PIC takes what everyone knows to be true — that our society is controlled by the wealthy few for their own advantage, to the detriment of the rest of us — and transforms it into some other guilty party, some other culprit (the Deep State, or greedy CEOs, or the coastal elite, or the woke). The PIC is an idea-laundering factory, where shadowy and conspiratorial schemes and plots are thrown up everywhere, obscuring the simple and obvious explanation for our troubles: plutocracy (government by the wealthy).

The big problem with the PIC is that the polarization itself must become more and more intense as time passes, because the system never actually delivers anything of substance for regular folks. Increasingly, we must survive on the thin gruel of rage and the toxic main course of revolving debt. Even the avalanche of Trump outrages is delivering only symbolic solace for his supporters, as wars drag on, inflation continues, and wages stay flat. Schadenfreude over the renaming of battleships can only provide so much fleeting satisfaction for the MAGA faithful.

As the polarization in American society reaches new heights, the two “sides” are reacting differently. Libs are currently in soul-searching mode, looking for the next hero or the next Big Idea. But on the conservative side, it is time to acknowledge that the deepest roots of Trumpism have changed. We’re no longer talking about racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, toxic masculinity, anti-wokism, etc. Those are all important sub-components of Trumpism, but the most important, deep-seated factor is now…. religion. This is not just a “cult mentality,” but full-blown religion, a fundamental desire for theocracy. The truth is that with Trumpism, tens of millions of Americans have moved beyond democracy, beyond the Constitution, beyond scientific and economic rationality, and far beyond the squishy, love-your-enemy themes of Jesus’ actual teaching. Trumpists have embraced full-spectrum theocracy, a phantasmagorical tribalism that puts in-group loyalty and out-group cruelty as the highest goods, beyond even the ethical precepts of religion itself, Christianity included. They have made the choice, crossing a moral Rubicon, that being on the “winning side,” no matter how symbolic and unreal, is more important than human rights, democratic rights, and basic human compassion and empathy (which has been rebranded as evil wokeness).

While the economic side of Trumpism is fairly standard for a GOP administration (tax cuts for plutocrats, deregulation, excessive salivation over the prospects of privatization; tariffs might seem novel, but that’s just because they’re even older than the other Republican stuff, so still boilerplate), and while a layer of grift and profiteering has been gilded onto the top of the policy slate, what ultimately keeps Trumpism afloat is the theocratic transformation of its base, the complete soul-selling of conservatives to the pernicious idea that regular people are split into the angelic elect and the demonic degenerates, with the latter deserving of nothing but marginalization, punishment, and death. As theocracies go, Trumpism is a tawdry one, built more on treacly rural idealization than lofty theological principle, and obsessed with the archaic pursuit that has always defined patriarchal and hierarchical societies: control of women’s bodies and their baby-making capacities.

In the big picture, this is the fundamental identity crisis of America. Are we a Christian nation that can justify its genocide of the indigenous population and of African slaves by appealing to a higher mission from God, one that continues on in the deformed social engineering of Project 2025? Or can we shake off the shackles of religious stupefaction and its fabricated, faux-tribalism, to create something more human and more at home in the natural world? As we face the meta-collapse of our planet and its natural support systems, will we retreat into the cold comfort of ancient hatreds, taking solace in our “side” maybe lasting a few years longer than our “enemies,” as the whole system sinks into a fetid morass of stagnation and death? Or can we actually tell the truth about ourselves, that our escape from and conquest of nature (and people unlike ourselves) is an inheritance of wind? Can we understand and acknowledge that we need a massive and rapid reset of human societies altogether, a transformation to a much less destructive lifestyle, one with no place for medieval theologies or archaic superstitions of blood and sexual purity?

Religions as we know them today were formed in the Axial Age (800-200 BCE), a period of extreme social dislocation and disassociation, as tribal forager-hunter societies, which had been the human social format for thousands of generations, gave way to the hierarchical formation of cities, empires, and civilizations, where human connection to nature and intimate contact with supportive communities were lost. The Axial Age response to this social trauma, this extinguishing of the actual tribe, was to create the pseudo-tribes of faith, where elaborate and abstract theologies emerged to explain why society had gone so horribly wrong (theodicy). Religions emerged to explain and fix this primordial disorder (“Make Eden Great Again”?), but they have never quite worked, because they don’t address the actual problem, which can be summarized as: humans must live in actual, physical, concrete tribes, in close, intimate contact with the natural world, in order to feel fully human and totally fulfilled. We cannot be “saved” from this world into an eternal, formless bliss. We must be saved back into THIS WORLD.

So for those who would fight Trumpism, we’re not just talking about a contest of ideas, or a battle over policy, or a war over the truth. We’re not really confronting the specter of authoritarianism or fascism or dictatorship, per se. Those are certainly immanent and existentially dangerous, but they are really just operational mechanisms for implementing a more fundamental, core idea: a faux-tribalistic theocracy, where a profound disconnection from both the planet and our fellow human beings is paramount, and where a cosmic battle of good vs. evil is the highest purpose, the truest reality.

The only way to fight theocracy is to create a different kind of lifestyle, a concrete manifestation of actual tribalism, which will render the faux-tribalism of theocracy obsolete. Ideologies grow out of physical, material conditions, not vice versa. (Marx the sociologist was right, even if Marx the historical soothsayer was off-base) If you want to change people’s minds and behaviors, you have to tangibly demonstrate and enable an alternate physical reality, an escape hatch to a different way of life that people can see, hear, and touch. Only then can you expect people to cast off the empty fantasies of theocratic faux-tribalism.

Think of it this way: religions emerged because the transition to civilization choked off people’s connections to the natural world and to each other. The disharmony that came with this shift from tribe to settled civilization was recast as a cosmic moral battle of good vs. evil, where evil comes to be seen in the very things from which we were disconnected: nature and other people. We have been killing the evil earth and the evil Other ever since, destroying the very things we need to reconnect TO, to be truly saved.

Only a real tribalism can displace the fake tribalism of theocracy. Only a reconnection to the planet and to each other can repair that primordial rift that first emerged in the Axial Age. If we continue down the road to theocracy, we will certainly perish, because the planet always plays the last trick (the true trump card), and no amount of imagined religious or moral “perfection” will render our unsustainable system sustainable. The brute fact is that we need a different kind of deliverance, not to an eternal world in the beyond, but back into our only actual home: the earth. As John Zerzan put it:

2500 years is long enough for us to have learned that escape from community, and from the earth, is not a solution, but a root cause of our troubles.