Does Trumpism Have A Future?

On an Ideological Level

Trump, Reactionary Modernist

On his Substack,

Adam Tooze

has a two-parter on “Trump’s futurism,” dealing with whether or not Trump’s movement contains a positive vision of the future. In part, it’s a response to a piece in the Guardian by Astra Taylor and Naomi Klein that characterizes Trumpism as “end times fascism:”

[A] politics which rather than constructively seeking to form a liveable world, wagers against the future and instead “banks on the bunker”, either in the form of personal survival (an option for the billionaire elite), planetary exit strategies, or fortress nationalisms.

Taylor and Klein believe that this makes it, at least on an ideological level, kind of worse than the original fascisms. Basically: “Say what you will about the tenets of fascism, at least it had a vision of the future.” Klein and Taylor write:

Reflecting on his childhood under Mussolini, the novelist and philosopher Umberto Eco observed in a celebrated essay that fascism typically has an “Armageddon complex” – a fixation on vanquishing enemies in a grand final battle. But European fascism of the 1930s and 1940s also had a horizon: a vision for a future golden age after the bloodbath that, for its in-group, would be peaceful, pastoral and purified. Not today.

Alive to our era of genuine existential danger – from climate breakdown to nuclear war to sky-rocketing inequality and unregulated AI – but financially and ideologically committed to deepening those threats, contemporary far-right movements lack any credible vision for a hopeful future. The average voter is offered only remixes of a bygone past, alongside the sadistic pleasures of dominance over an ever-expanding assemblage of dehumanized others.

Tooze is a little skeptical of this account, as am I. First off, I’m just not sure how accurate a characterization of fascist thought this is. War and struggle on a biological, Darwinian level dominate the fascist imagination. Nazism had a vision of endless, genocidal racial warfare. If you want to take it seriously, The Doctrine of Fascism, written by Giovanni Gentile and signed by Mussolini, intones:

Fascism does not, generally speaking, believe in the possibility or utility of perpetual peace. It therefore discards pacifism as a cloak for cowardly supine renunciation in contradistinction to self-sacrifice. War alone keys up all human energies to their maximum tension and sets the seal of nobility on those peoples who have the courage to face it.¹

One of the reasons I think it makes sense to bring the history of fascism into the analysis of Trumpism and contemporary right-populisms is the return of this zero-sum, conflictual worldview that takes the struggle for existence as an ontological principle. The opponents of the fascism thesis are correct that—at least so far—Trumpism is not nearly as bellicose as historical fascism, which loudly and repeatedly announced war to be the highest human calling. And, to be fair, the idea of an American “golden age” suggests at least some Utopian ideal being envisioned beyond Trump’s morose put-downs of human possibility.

The question of the future makes me think of something from an earlier “fascism debate.” The German historian Ernst Nolte characterized fascism as a “resistance to transcendence.” Now, in true German fashion, that sounds extremely abstruse. As more of a philosophical than historical concept, it’s often been dismissed or denigrated by his fellow historians as confusing or even nonsensical. The conservative Nolte’s reputation also suffered a bit for his part in the famous Historikerstreit, when he argued that too much emphasis was put on the exceptionally evil nature of Nazism in way that was unfair to Germans. But I have to say that his idea of resistance to transcendence has always resonated with me in the Trump era.

According to Nolte, there are two types of transcendence: practical and theoretical. Practical transcendence is the process of overcoming social problems, which includes technological development as well as political change. Theoretical transcendence is thought moving beyond its starting place and originary prejudices towards a more universal perspective. As Nolte writes in his 1963 book The Three Faces of Fascism:

Theoretical transcendence may be taken to mean the reaching out of the mind beyond what exists and what can exist toward an absolute whole; in a broader sense this may be applied to all that goes beyond, that releases man from the confines of the everyday world, and which, as an "awareness of the horizon", makes it possible for him to experience the world as a whole.

For Nolte, Fascism involves a rejection of the possibility of both the expansion of society’s abundant productivity to all and to thought reaching beyond itself: “Maurras' and Hitler's real enemy was seen to be ‘freedom toward the infinite’ which, intrinsic in the individual and a reality in evolution, threatens to destroy the familiar and the beloved.” It does not try to create a world of international law and deliberation, nor does it try to adopt a broader, cosmopolitan, humanistic perspective. In fact, it hates both those things above all else. Nolte says that fascism’s resistance to both practical and theoretical transcendence is what makes it different from mere conservatism. It’s a politics that arises from despair rather than mere skepticism about the premises and conclusions of liberalism, which Nolte—I’m not kidding—identifies with both a theoretical and practical “abundance agenda”, writing “Liberal society is a society of abundance” that seeks maximal social and theoretical freedom. On the other hand, Fascism can be characterized as “the despair of the feudal section of bourgeois society for its traditions, and the bourgeois element's betrayal of its revolution.”

This politics of despair and refusal of transcendence certainly resonates with Klein and Taylor’s characterization of Trumpism’s national bunker mentality. But neither Trumpism nor classical fascism can be summed up as simple reactions to or rejections of modernity or a desire to recreate the past. They also have their futuristic sides. For instance, Tooze brings in Musk’s developmental project. Peter Thiel has spoken of a kind of “retro-futuristic” aspect of Trumpism and complains of piddling market and consumer-servicing businesses instead of great techno-industrial titans. And Trump’s postmodern combination of architectural modernism with Versailles kitsch certainly fits well with Curtis Yarvin’s yearning for a techno-monarchy.

This is where I think Jeffrey Herf’s concept of “reactionary modernism” is very helpful and goes a far way to explain why Trumpism feels fascist, because I think both classical fascism and Trumpism are essentially reactionary modernist phenomena. In his book, Herf writes, “The reactionary modernists were nationalists who turned the romantic anticapitalism of the German Right away from backward-looking pastoralism, pointing instead to the out- lines of a beautiful new order replacing the formless chaos due to capitalism in a united, technologically advanced nation":"

The re- actionary modernists believed that modern technology could be made compatible with particularity, immediacy, and experience rather than with analysis, intellect, and abstraction; with life, soul, and feeling, rather than with deadly concepts and formulas; with blood rather than with money; with the permanence of form over the transience of the chaotic market; with the beauty of authoritarian politics rather than with the confusion and lack of clarity of parliamentary discussion; with production and use value over circulation, parasitism, and exchange value; with masculine will rather than with effeminate reconciliation with nature; with the primacy of nationalist politics rather than with the selfish economic interests; with the racial Volk rather than with the Jews.

They rejected “Jewish” financial capitalism and international trade for an ideal of pure industrial productivity at the behest of the nation. In like manner, Trumpism in its more visionary transports rejects a “feminized” service capitalism in favor of domestic heavy industry and technological development. It decouples social progress from technological progress and, in fact, it presents social progress—integration, equality, tolerance, etc.—as actual fetters to technological and industrial development. Think: “Women and DEI hires are holding us back.” It’s the not-really-veiled belief of Silicon Valley satraps that if we were allowed to race science and not held back by “woke” liberal sentimentalism, they could make great strides. And we can also start to think about why climate change tech or development does not fit into the framework: it represents a kind of reconciliation with the Earth that seems feminine. Musk was only accepted on the Right when he made his bonafides as a total asshole clear.

Trumpism, like fascism before it, is not solely future-oriented or past-oriented, but involves a peculiar and perverse synthesis. To bring it back to Nolte, and where you can reconcile Tooze with Klein and Taylor, is perhaps one could say it has a future, but it resists transcendence: there is the idea of production, national expansion, growth, development, but combined with a sharp restriction and rollback of who gets to share in the political and social bounties of citizenship.

One more quick thought: There have been a lot of frankly rather stupid comparisons of Trumpist economics with Marxism in the wake of tariffs. But if you think about it, it’s the exact opposite of Marxism: Orthodox Marxism contends that social inequalities hold society back productively, while Trumpism is the proposition that the efforts to overcome social inequalities are what is holding us back.

1. A quick sidebar. Part of the next section sounds eerily like JD Vance’s distorted reading of Ordo Amoris: “The Fascist loves 5 his neighbor, but the word neighbor does not stand for some vague and unseizable conception. Love of one’s neighbor does not exclude necessary educational severity; still less does it exclude differentiation and rank. Fascism will have nothing to do with universal embraces; as a member of the community of nations it looks other peoples straight in the eyes; it is vigilant and on its guard; it follows others in all their manifestations and notes any changes in their interests; and it does not allow itself to be deceived by mutable and fallacious appearances.”