In a democracy the people choose a leader in whom they trust. Then the chosen leader says, ‘Now shut up and obey me.’ People and party are then no longer free to interfere in his business.

Max Weber

In our current plot position of “Trump 2: Revenge of Trump,” the question heard with increasing frequency is, “can this guy last another three years?” His erratic conduct [sic] of late would indicate not. There are legitimate warning signs of physical and mental deterioration, and his behavior has the feel of a dying man desperately trying to shove as many self-aggrandizing ego-projects down our throats as possible, before the meter ticks down to zero.

In profoundly un-American fashion, he is trying to memorialize himself while he is still actually alive, setting up a bizarre stage for any would-be successors. They will have to pay homage to the Great One for years, as they flit between rooms, buildings, and airports with the golden Trump logo emblazoned thereon. For those hoping for a more cooperative federal government after Trump, this self-hagiography is a problem, for it locks in the hyper-polarized, insufferably dualistic conditions that have stalked us since the Gingrich-Murdoch-Limbaugh conservative revolution of the 1990s.

Trump is basically making it impossible for any of his successors to say a single nice word about Dems or any other liberals. Indeed, the de facto motto of MAGA and Trumpism itself is, “Hey, at least we’re not radical left lunatics!” I suppose there’s a chance that a dark horse GOP leader could emerge, if there’s anything left to salvage, a grown-up in the room who is more interested in solving actual problems, instead of being obsessed with expelling, suppressing, ridiculing, and crushing anything and anyone “on the other side.”

But I highly doubt it. The Polarization Industrial Complex (PIC) is too tightly constructed, too robust, and too big of a cash cow for Trump heirs to ignore. There’s just too much money to be made by harnessing grievance in all its forms, while simultaneously using the government itself as a piggybank for one’s own personal benefit. After all, we can’t forget that, for all his insanity and recklessness, Trump still makes life pretty sweet for plutocrats, via tax cuts, deregulation, and general non-enforcement of any laws that might inconvenience the Masters of the Universe. And chances are that any GOP Trump successor will be even MORE plutocrat-friendly, as they would likely undo the disastrous tariffs that make the corporate class uneasy. So when Trump leaves the stage, whether that’s sooner (via death or the 25th amendment) or later, libs will likely be confronting more of the same, just with a slight less-scary facade.

There are many liberals who believe that Trumpism will not survive the end of Trump himself. They view the MAGA faithful as bona fide cultists, who will splinter into a thousand pieces when the charismatic leader himself heads down to that great sauna at the center of the earth (I’ve heard that its walls are lined with gold, so the Don will probably love it). But I think that is a miscalculation. Yes, the specific charisma of Trump is likely impossible to replicate — no one really combines utter shamelessness, teflon imperviousness to the truth, and carnival-barker showmanship the way he does. But Trumpism itself is less cult-like than people imagine, and his successors can still tap into the main function of Trump, which is to serve as a cosmic vehicle of retribution against the libs.

Rather than rip each other to pieces while failing to capture Trump’s charisma, I think his successors will play the humble disciple card. I can already hear this line of attack: “Look, I’m certainly no Donald Trump. No one is, or can be. No one can fully replicate his greatness, patriotism, and heroism. But I will devote my Presidency to fulfilling and extending Donald Trump’s holy mission, to stamp out radical left lunacy, illegal immigrant crime, and the crazy sexual deviants and trans-freaks who hate God and America. With President Trump as my inspiration, I will do my very best to carry on his great legacy.”

That’s it. That’s all that would be required to keep the spirit of Trump alive. In that sense, Trumpism is more like a full-fledged religion than a cult, as there is a core theological principle behind the man: endless warfare against libs as a holy crusade. And like any religion, salvation comes through adherence to these theological principles, and not just the personal magnetism of the founder. For example, Jesus the man was a great guy, by all accounts, but it is the function of the Christ-figure that that really matters for Christianity, the absolving of sin and the deliverance to eternal life. Similarly, Trumpism can outlive the man, as long as his successors preserve the central principle of crushing the libs and all their unworthy, subhuman clients.

Even with a mid-term victory, something that is still firmly in jeopardy because of Trump’s fanatical desire to avoid impeachment and lame-duck status, the Dems and other liberals cannot afford to be complacent, thinking that a neutered (or dead) Trump means the end of our national nightmare. Rather, the Democrats need to attack the root principle of Trumpism itself, that pseudo-theological mobilization of grievance which is used to demonize all things liberal.

Now actually, this is already generally acknowledged by libs. Most understand that the GOP has been able to bundle together various forms of grievance and resentment, in order to create their coalition. But the usual interpretation of these grievances is that they just represent backward, loathsome ideologies like sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, nationalistic jingoism, etc. In this interpretation, the general sense is that MAGA people just can’t accept the reality and irreversibility of social change, and are living in the past.

There is some truth in this view, but it doesn’t quite get at the core of the issue, and it doesn’t open up many constructive options for action. An alternative interpretation of Trumpism’s grievance obsession is that rural people (Trumpism is highly correlated to non-urban areas) have been shafted and left behind by globe-trotting, labor-shedding capitalism. In this view, Trumpists are expressing well-justified anger at being abandoned by the corporate and financial elite, but that they are then misdirecting that rage onto women, minorities, and immigrants — the proverbial punching down instead of up. This is closer to the mark, as the main function of the PIC truly is to deflect justified anger that should be going towards the plutocrats, and shunt if off into other places that won’t upset the apple cart of the economic status quo.

But we have to even more “Marxist,” so to speak, by looking at the material building blocks of our economy and society, which are the ultimate source of all social reality and social change. Our current polycrisis goes all the way down, into the physical and economic layout of the household, the basic unit of consumer-industrial capitalism. The present format of the household is an abject failure. It is too small to provide economic security, too wasteful to have positive ecological effects, and too isolated to provide the inherent tribal needs of our social primate brains.

At bottom, the grievances leveraged by Trump are anguished cries over the collapse of this failure of the household unit, and Trumpism is a desperate attempt to reconstitute it along the obsolete lines of past eras, whether that’s bronze age farmer-herder culture, or 1950s TV-family fiction.

The liberal stance on these matters has taken for granted that the smaller households generated by women’s rights, education, and careers, along with the demographic transition spawned by these advances, is perfectly fine, an acceptable development reflecting greater freedom of choice for women.

Except that this even smaller household — average US household size is now 3.15 — is completely unsuited to tackling our current morass. Any attempt to unseat Trumpism itself has to have a real solution to the anguish over the collapse of the household unit. More of the same from Democrats just won’t cut it. As regular readers of this blog know, that solution involves a radical push to reconstituting the household into a much larger unit: Bigger Home Bases.