Tags
conservatism, Donald Trump, Giorgia Meloni, Leslie Lenkowsky, Narendra Modi, Recep Tayyip Erdoǧan, Ronald Reagan, United States
As awful as the second Trump administration is, very little is accomplished by criticizing it from the perspective of a leftist like me. The administration wants to appall us, even take revenge on us. That’s the point. I’ve seen multiple bumper stickers and T-shirts proclaiming “Trump: Make liberals cry again.” As far as I can tell, last time, Trump drew strength from every apopleptic tweet our team raged out about how horrible it all is. We can and should take concrete steps to fight it all – the only obvious one being to contribute to legal funds challenging his actions in the courts, of which Democracy Forward seems to be the most prominent – but we do little by publicly expressing our outrage. Our hatred of any Trump administration is a feature, not a bug.
Old-fashioned Reaganite conservatives who stay true to their principles are going to be pretty horrified, too. When an unrepentant admirer of the old Soviet Union conquers back USSR territory (at great human cost on both sides), it’s got to be crushing to see the leader of “the free world” walk away from the conflict on terms favourable to the conqueror. But it’s been startling to see how few even care about those Reaganite principles anymore. Some of the ones who do, like Dick Cheney, often already campaigned for the other side – in a way that may have served only to illustrate that side’s complete ideological incoherence. (If you advertise that you’ve got endorsements ranging from Bernie Sanders to Dick Cheney, does that really look like you’re the common-sense consensus candidate, or does it look like you stand for nothing at all?)
All of which makes far too much criticism of the administration effectively irrelevant. If you’re a true-blue Reaganite, let alone a leftist, it means none of the people who put this administration in power actually care what you think. And that’s a big problem, because what the administration is doing is really, really bad – even from the perspective of its sympathizers.
Whether or not you agree with it, rising numbers of voters around the world have come to support a relatively coherent nativist and nationalist right wing, from Giorgia Meloni in Italy and Nigel Farage in the UK to Recep Tayyip Erdoǧan in Turkey and above all Narendra Modi in India. This ideology advocates a stronger nation-state tied to national cultures, with a nationalism built around people and land, and correspondingly less immigration. It also correspondingly seeks to reduce international involvement – leaving international institutions like the European Union, and avoiding the attempt to police global conflict. It draws popularity from being less avowedly capitalist than its Reaganite predecessors – less hostile to popular broad-based social programs, like the US’s Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. But like other right-wing movements before it, it does continue to advocate military strength – greatness in the sense of power. In the US, the ideology typically goes by the name of Trump’s slogan “MAGA”: Make America Great Again.
What’s striking about Trump’s first months, though, is the way they don’t follow this ideology – and perhaps not any other either. Leslie Lenkowsky, a professor studying philanthropy and public affairs, points out that the Reagan administration, in the 1980s, also attacked government institutions as Trump is doing – but notes a key difference. With the Reagan administration, Lenkowsky notes, “There was actually a pretty articulate philosophy here”, trying to get the government out of social causes but support private nonprofit foundations in doing the same. By comparison, Lenkowsky notes, this administration has no such philosophy – possibly no philosophy at all.
Leftists have always found this hard to believe, but American voters at large have consistenly perceived Trump as a moderate, indeed more so than his Democratic opponents – in large part because, where George W. Bush and Paul Ryan and other major Republicans before him tried to attack the popular but expensive Social Security program, Trump has continually promised not to do so. That was always a big part of his appeal. But the government-wide purges affect Social Security administrators too, enough that there’s a good chance that Social Security recipients will be denied their cheques within a few months. That is not what his voters want. Nor did they want or expect the world’s richest man to be given free rein to eliminate whatever government jobs he feels like.
So too, one of the commonalities between the Make America Great Again movement and the Reaganites before it is a masculinist admiration of power and military strength. That’s why it is so striking that so many of Trump’s first policies serve to make the US weak.
A great deal of the US’s military advantage over a larger country like China comes from science and technology. And American science and technology are exactly what Trump is attacking: he effectively tried to stop science in the United States, for an unspecified period of time, by stopping the National Science Foundation funding and National Institute of Health funding on which scientists depend. That sort of thing easily hamstrings the US’s military capacity – to say nothing of his cuts to the military’s administration itself, suddenly removing loyal military veterans from their jobs and dismissing concerns with “perhaps they’re not fit to have a job at this moment.” (Meanwhile, China is happy to hire the researchers the US is losing.)
Moreover, anyone who’s played Diplomacy knows that what you become and remain a strong and powerful political player by cultivating the right alliances at the right time. From a pure Realpolitik perspective, you may well need to backstab your allies at some point – but if you’re going to do that, you wait for the strategic moment when you can take maximum advantage of this. If you just betray your allies for funsies, you lose.
It is a reasonable MAGA position to advocate a more isolationist foreign policy, getting the US out of conflicts like the war in Ukraine. But if one wants one’s allies to remain allies, one could at least give them time to prepare for such a pullout, which Trump has not. One way or another, the removal involves some negotiation. But there’s no MAGA reason to begin such negotiation by saying the foreign dictator should get everything he wants, right off the bat without extracting any concessions. If it were a matter of prioritizing US interests, there would have been plenty of US interests that Trump could have demanded from Putin – and chose not to.
Finally, an “America First” policy might lead one to think tariffs are a helpful strategy for promoting domestic manufacturing. But that promotion cannot happen overnight. In order to make that happen, manufacturers have to be able to plan for it. Repeatedly turning tariffs on and off again just creates chaos for everybody: one gets the increased prices that tariffs lead to (at a time of inflation!), and the costs of retaliatory tariffs on the other side, without any promotion of domestic manufacturing.
What Trump is doing now is not what his voters asked for. It’s not what he campaigned on. Whatever else we say about Meloni and Modi and Erdoǧan, they are governing competently; they are not pulling these sorts of random stunts. Nobody asked for all this – not even MAGA voters. Getting that message out is going to be a hugely important part of stopping it.
One does wonder: why exactly is Trump doing all this? One answer may be that he is term-limited: he’s not constitutionally allowed to run for president again in 2028. (If he does try to ignore the Constitution and stick around longer than that, it probably won’t involve an election.) So he doesn’t actually have to care about what voters want him to do anymore. He can just go ahead and do the shit he’s always felt like doing, disregarding what his own voters wanted since he’s not accountable to them anymore. And as far as I can tell, Trump – who was a pro-choice liberal Democrat within recent memory – has no particular ideology or philosophy underlying the stuff he wants to do, it’s just random shit that happens to have landed in his brain, at a time when the most powerful state in the world has handed him the keys. As for what lands in that brain, revenge – against universities, Canada, the civil service, and others who have been critical of him – so far seems to be playing the leading role.
But in the end, Trump’s motivations are not what matters most. The important thing is for the rest of us to emphasize – especially to Trump’s sympathizers – that what he’s doing isn’t what they want or asked for. Because they’re the ones with the power to stop it.
Yeah, I think there’s a very strong case against Trump from the POV of those who support him, though I’d go harder on foreign policy and less hard on the domestic stuff. I think most of this stuff – isolationism, tariffs, DOGE – was signalled before the election, even if it wasn’t front and centre of a campaign (heck, I can remember watching a Trump rally before the *2016* election in which he got massive cheers for declaring he was going to bring in tariffs), and even if people might have hoped the implementation wouldn’t be stupid. And what goes unmentioned in your account of the new right is that it has gained popularity and (occasionally) power in response to a deranged, unhinged radical extremism on immigration like we saw from the Biden administration. Denmark shows that simply by curbing the far-left extremism on immigration, and adopting policies that were universally regarded as common sense until the day before yesterday, you can really take the wind out of the sails of the new right. Trump may be overreaching (and thus inviting contrary winds in a few years), but his instincts here are a lot closer to the centre than the people he replaced.
But on foreign policy, I think it would be hard to exaggerate how bad this is. Doing things like meeting with the AfD but not the democratically elected government of Germany is basically a hostile act, as is making noises about Canadian sovereignty or Greenland. That sort of thing could take decades to undo, and could be the beginning of a major split in the West. Downstream from this is a lot that is Very Bad, and not only for the people beyond America’s borders. And as you suggest, all unnecessary, all done for no benefit (also, American defence companies do well selling US weapons to allied countries who have been given strong reason to spend at least part of their money elsewhere).
Anyway, the shape of things to come looks to me like this: Trump with his tariffs and irrational behaviour brings bad times, leading to Republican defeat in 2028. The Democrats fail to learn their lesson and unleash on us another round of hard left totalitarian extremism. Hard to see how an off-ramp from the crazy comes along.
The claim that the Biden administration was “hard left totalitarian extremism” is one that I hadn’t heard before and raised my eyebrow. Needing more information, I asked Google: Why do people call the Biden administration totalitarian? Google responded with a rather helpful top hit, “Is the United States Totalitarian?” by Gabriel Schoenfeld (who is not exactly a radical leftist, if you look at his résumé) and published in Lawfare in May 2022. It gave me the background knowledge I needed and what I take to be a reasonable evaluation of the claim.
I am with Nathan: painting the Biden administration as “totalitarian” seems pretty wacky to me. The claim has a bit more plausibility with respect to institutions in cultural industries and possibly the nonprofit sector, where there was a culture of intolerance of dissent – but not only was that restricted to those specific institutions, it was fading quickly well before Trump’s election. (The fact that I felt able to make that post at all – and saw not the slightest repercussion for it – is a testament to that.)
What is the case is that the Biden administration took an extreme position on the specific issue of immigration – probably based in part on the delusion that that was going to win them Latino votes. Now that it’s clear that it did the opposite, though, I’d be pretty startled if future Democrats were dumb enough to keep that up.
As for the issues raised in the post, yes, Trump did signal that he was going to put in tariffs – but he didn’t signal that the implementation was going to be this idiotic. People who like tariffs like them because they are supposed to boost local manufacturing, and there’s no way they can accomplish that this way.
There were a number of liberal pundits in the 2000s – Josh Marshall is the one I remember – who recanted their previous support for the Iraq war because “I supported a war in Iraq and I still think it would have been a good idea, but I came to realize I shouldn’t have supported this war in Iraq.” I think that’s the kind of position that reasonable tariff supporters would find themselves in right now.
Yeah, fair enough on what people voted for.
As for ‘totalitarian’ in relation to the Biden administration, what I had in mind there was the arc from the through crushing of the (true) Hunter Biden laptop story, through the Twitter files to the revelations from Zuckerberg and Andreesen this past January. It is entirely possible that the laptop story might have decided the 2020 election, and the idea behind that episode, to use social and major media together to determine the narrative and utterly eliminate certain things that contradict it, even if they are true, does seem to have become something like government policy under Biden. The Twitter files – essentially Musk’s revelation after he took over that the government had had a close relationship with Twitter (and other social media) to manage / eliminate narratives – was completely ignored by major media, which gave me pause. Post-2024-election, however, Zuckerberg & Andreesen have confirmed and expanded on that story. Had I known that when I voted, it might well have moved me to the Trump camp: the sort of centralised control over information that was taking shape is something that has to be stopped at the cost of almost anything else. I don’t think ‘totalitarian’ is going too far here, and I think we dodged a bullet in that respect. (Which is not to deny the force of many of the points you make in the post.)
(the Hunter Biden laptop story was basically nuked: the NY Post, which dropped it as an October surprise in 2020, had its social media accounts shut down, links to the story were completely wiped out – you couldn’t even send them in a private message on major social media – and major media together with ‘experts’ that included something like 50 people from various US intelligence outfits, all declared the story to be Russian misinformation; at least some of the ‘experts’ will have known they were lying. Many months later, the NY Times ran a story noting that the NY Post had actually been right; later still, it came out that the FBI took the laptop to be genuine even before the story broke. I still think about this one because I believed the lies at the time, and while it wouldn’t have changed my vote, it could have changed the outcome of the election in a number of ways, like depressing enthusiasm for Biden.)
It’s pretty common across the political spectrum for politicians to try to minimize damaging information and to work with sympathetic media outlets to do so, and I don’t mean to excuse anyone who does it by saying that. I didn’t follow the Hunter Biden laptop controversy closely, but the lead section of the Wikipedia article notes: “Trump attempted to turn the story into an October surprise to hurt Joe Biden’s campaign by falsely alleging that, while in office, Biden had acted corruptly regarding Ukraine to protect his son.” So it sounds like people on both sides told lies to try to make the best of the situation. And some social media platforms have famously switched sides since.
If you read Gabriel Schoenfeld’s article that I mentioned above, I would be interested to know whether you were already familiar with the cultural context that Schoenfeld described. Is it just a random coincidence that you described the Biden administration as totalitarian with no prior knowledge of that cultural context, or were you reading the kind of right-wing sources described by Schoenfeld, and you picked up the language from there? You don’t have to answer, but I am curious. If someone called the Trump administration “fascist”, I would assume that they picked up that language from left-wing sources, although that assumption could be wrong, of course. Schoenfeld makes a pretty good argument, I think, that the use of the word “totalitarian” does go too far.
I don’t think the Schoenfeld article is helpful – its engagement with much of the material it opposes seems to me often rhetorical rather than substantive; I don’t think he really comes to grips with what his opponents are saying (e.g., Dreher’s “soft totalitarianism” is an insightful term partly because it is paradoxical). I’m not sure what ‘cultural context’ you have in mind; I can’t say I got much new information. The use of a definition of ‘totalitarian’ in which six characteristics are required strikes me as particularly unhelpful – it basically removes the concept from discussion. (Not even the Nazis were fully totalitarian!) I’d say the word can usefully be used to describe aims that are partially / substantially attained.
The use of ‘totalitarian’ by me WRT the Biden government is really aimed at their attempt to control social media, and thus the flow of information, even if true, and the conversations people can have online. Perhaps it’s a bit OTT in that context, though I’m not so sure – an attempt to do that is certainly not characteristic of liberal democratic government. The RW authors that Schoenfeld goes after have something a bit more expansive in mind, something not limited to government, with which I am in certain cases inclined to agree, and which coheres with what I was saying, though I wasn’t really speaking with them in mind.
Again agreed with Nathan. The suppressing of the laptop story is bad and you’re right to point that out: it is an attempt to silence strong opponents that comes out of the chilling playbook of Orbán or Erdoǧan.
That said, Orbán and Erdoǧan are not totalitarians either – not like Xi or Putin. A normal authoritarian or Caesarist state resorts to petty and brute means to silence its most prominent foes, but for everyone else, life goes on. A totalitarian state is one in which there is no “life goes on”: government control seeps into every aspect of life. If the Biden régime had been totalitarian it would have tried to shut down Fox News and all the other major media outlets that did go on about the laptop story. It did nothing of the sort.
Although Ernst Fraenkel in his book The Dual State makes the arguement that the Nazi regime maintained a “normative” state operating according to normal legal rules and regulations for the majority of the population to handle contracts, torts, and so on, and a “prerogative state” “which exercised unlimited arbitrariness and violence towards state enemies, e.g., Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, the mentally retarded and schizophrenic, communists, etc. I think we tend to underestimate how normal (until the war) German life under Nazi rule was for most Germans. We could say the same for the Chinese today. Unless you are a Tibetan or a Uygher or a pro-democracy activist, life is pretty much normal for most Chinese. Fraenkel—despite being Jewish—continued to work as lawyer in Germany until 1939—due to the fact that he served in the German military during WWI. The point here is that “life does go on” even under totalitarian states, at least for the majority.
I’m not sure about that. I think of the Chinese hukou system that regulates where people are allowed to live, or more famously the one-child policy. Or how under Salazar’s dictatorship in Portugal, government agents would raid people’s homes and confiscate their typewriters. Or the way that Gadamer under the Nazis had to give nationalist speeches for fear of losing his job. Or more generally the Chinese régime of strict media censorship – of anything critical of the government, more than just one story (which, again, was circulated quite a bit on US conservative media). What makes a totalitarian system totalitarian is that it extends its reach deeply – even for the majority.
There is a fundamental fact stated in this post which has always been resounding, in my opinion. Neither side in our bicameral system of government cares what the opposite side thinks. And, this has been the point, ever since the beginning of the USA. The system of checks and balances, of which we are proud, begins, not in the components of governance, executive; legislative and judicial; but within the grass-roots notion of a two-party base, essentially, us v them. If you are *us*, you are, by definition, *them*, to the other side of the aisle. The system originated in the UK’s house of commons-house of Lords dichotomy. So, push and shove; checks and balances—these pairings are as old—well, nearly—as tribalism itself. It is a dualism, aimed towards unity. One problem emerges when the aim is not true. When us v them supplants attempts at unification. We need not blame it on Mr. Trump. He is only an instrument, representing, *divide and conquer*. Countless others have done the same. Very tribal and old. Even, primitive.
I don’t think this is true. I’m old enough to remember the Southern Blue Dog Democrats who had more in common with Republicans than with other Democrats – or 2001 when basically the whole country regrettably lined up behind George W. Bush. The country has experienced various divisions in its past, for sure – but only one of them, 160 years ago, was more severe than the 2020s. It has moved between division and unification, and the divisions have mutated and become very different over time.
Good.