One Year Later

Looking Back

It’s been one whole year of Trump 2. I can’t, at this point, offer a comprehensive reflection on what has transpired, but I thought it might be helpful, maybe more for me as a writer than you as a reader, to go back and see how well my analysis has held up.

My piece from the day after the inauguration, "Welcome to Vichy America,” I think, has held up the worst. Here’s part of what I wrote:

If you want an analogy for the present state of America it’s perhaps not an out-and-out fascist regime, but a Vichy regime. It’s partly fascist but mostly just a reactionary and defeatist catch-all. It’s a regime born of capitulation and of defeat: of the slow and then sudden collapse of the longstanding institutions of a great democracy whose defenders turned out to be senile and unable to cope with or understand modern politics. It’s a regime of born exhaustion, nihilism, and cynicism: the loss of faith in the old verities of the republic. A regime of national humiliation pretending to be a regime of restoration of national honor. It claims to be at once a national revolution and a national restoration. It’s a hybrid regime: a coalition that includes the fascist far right, of course, but also technocratic modernizers who might have once called themselves liberals, the big industrialists, and old social conservatives. Even some disaffected socialists and leftists for whom liberalism was always the main enemy want to give it the benefit of the doubt. It’s a regime of collaboration and sympathy: the #resistance may have dominated the political style of the first Trump administration, but now, as Trump says, everyone wants to be his friend.

Some extremely literal-minded and pedantic critics pointed out that the analogy was imperfect because America had not been defeated in a war, but I specify exactly what I think the points of comparison are. I think the problem with the piece is that I underestimated the radicalism of the regime and underestimated the appetite for resistance, perhaps not among elites, but definitely among ordinary people.

In that vein, I think my critique of the “vibe shift” discourse holds up much better:

So, “vibe shift” is essentially a move in the capital markets. It’s the Trump trade. And a lot of people are trying to take a position: Long, short, hedged, etc. I remember someone Tweeting when the vibe shift discourse broke out in in 2022, “I’m hodling [sic] politics during the vibe shift.” It’s a change in fashion that demands concessions. “You don’t talk about fascism any more. Wokism is demodé. This is the new thing.” But this thing is not even terribly avant-garde anymore. While some of the proponents of the legitimacy of vibe shift discourse are trying to differentiate themselves from fussy, positivistic “midcult” liberal punditry, they should pay close attention to where the vibe shift discourse is now being reproduced: you’re aligned with Ezra Klein and Shadi Hamid here. I do not mean this in a derogatory way necessarily, but this is the New York Times and The Washington Post we’re talking about. They are at the center of elite consensus building. It’s already passed through the lower intestine of center-right opinion-making: Tyler Cowen’s blog. Ross Douthat writes that we are in a new age of myth and feeling, but the positivists and stat-mongers (and engineers, never trust ’em) seem to agree and are now the ones most invested in talking vibes. (A smart critic would notice this identity of pundit positivism and neo-romantic irrationalism and make something of it. Perhaps the uniting idea is the stock ticker and the financial chart?) And it’s already a bit of a slogan or a cliché. Another way of putting this is that it’s become commoditized: it was seeded as as a boutique property in the trend incubator of downtown Manhattan, and now it’s reached the outer boroughs and made its way to Washington D.C., not exactly a center of cutting-edge fashion. Unfortunately, the opinion journalism business works largely through the recycling of clichés: liberal elites, wokeness, national reckoning, the end of X, and so and so forth. One must be careful not to reify the clichés: just because everyone says it’s real doesn’t make it real. Or rather, it does, and that’s the problem.

…

I’m shorting the “vibe shift” because I think it’s based on air: I think sooner or later we’re headed for a big crash of the Trump bubble, but, also, God help us all when that happens.

The vibe shift had a shorter shelf life than a carton of oat milk. The culture has not shifted permanently towards Trumpiness, despite the best efforts of the pundits and pseuds.

I also think my look shortly after the inauguration at the Imperialism section of Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism is pretty instructive still, especially in light of the Greenland and Venezuela business. I’m going to quote her, because I think her analysis of imperialism applies much better than that of Lenin:

Imperialism must be considered the first stage in political rule of the bourgeoisie rather than the last stage of capitalism. It is well known how little the owning classes had aspired to government, how well contented they had been with every type of state that could be trusted with protection of property rights. For them, indeed, the state had always been only a well-organized police force. This false modesty, however, had the curious consequence of keeping the whole bourgeois class out of the body politic; before they were subjects in a monarchy or citizens in a republic, they were essentially private persons. This privateness and primary concern with money-making had developed a set of behavior patterns which are expressed in all those proverbs—“nothing succeeds like success,” “might is right,” “right is expediency,” etc.—that necessarily spring from the experience of a society of competitors.

When, in the era of imperialism, businessmen became politicians and were acclaimed as statesmen, while statesmen were taken seriously only if they talked the language of successful businessmen and “thought in continents,” these private practices and devices were gradually transformed into rules and principles for the conduct of public affairs. The significant fact about this process of revaluation, which began at the end of the last century and is still in effect, is that it began with the application of bourgeois convictions to foreign affairs and only slowly was extended to domestic politics. Therefore, the nations concerned were hardly aware that the recklessness that had prevailed in private life, and against which the public body always had to defend itself and its individual citizens, was about to be elevated to the one publicly honored political principle.

The “real estate” model and expansion for expansion’s sake seem to vindicate this picture. Also insightful is her psychological picture of the imperialist bourgeoisie—it sounds so very much like the attitude of the tech barons:

In the imperialistic epoch a philosophy of power became the philosophy of the elite, who quickly discovered and were quite ready to admit that the thirst for power could be quenched only through destruction. This was the essential cause of their nihilism (especially conspicuous in France at the turn, and in Germany in the twenties, of this century) which replaced the superstition of progress with the equally vulgar superstition of doom, and preached automatic annihilation with the same enthusiasm that the fanatics of automatic progress had preached the irresistibility of economic laws.

….

The so-called accumulation of capital which gave birth to the bourgeoisie changed the very conception of property and wealth: they were no longer considered to be the results of accumulation and acquisition but their beginnings; wealth became a never-ending process of getting wealthier. The classification of the bourgeoisie as an owning class is only superficially correct, for a characteristic of this class has been that everybody could belong to it who conceived of life as a process of perpetually becoming wealthier, and considered money as something sacrosanct which under no circumstances should be a mere commodity for consumption.

I actually think Arendt’s account might be too materialist! She still thinks it’s the operation of capital accumulation that pushes businessmen in this imperialistic direction, but it seems to happen without a clear investment strategy, although I have not analyzed the tech angle of recent imperial adventures.

Shortly after the election, I wrote a piece called “Testing the Fascism Thesis” that tried to stipulate some conditions under which I would admit the fascism thesis was no longer the best frame for understanding the Trump phenomenon. I wrote up a bunch of points of what one might expect if the core hypothesis was sound: —

• The use of state-tolerated or encouraged mobs, either organized into paramilitaries or quasi-organized, to physically intimidate, maim, or kill political enemies and even unreliable allies. This is a big one and arguably already has come true. If this is a regular part of the politics of the next few years, I think the fascism thesis is in pretty good shape.

• The use of mobs/paramilitaries as deputies to general state repression of dissent. This also would be a big red flag, but I have less confidence in this coming true. I think the cops will be enough.

• Suspending elections or using violence, particularly assisted by paramilitaries or mobs, to disrupt elections. I don’t really see elections being in serious danger—at least, at first.

• The use of the state security apparatus on domestic political rivals. This one needs no explanation.

• The use of federal troops and officers for mass deportations; the creation of a system of detention camps for the same purpose

• The purging of “old regime” military officials and bureaucrats and replacement with new regime loyalists.

• The use of extreme, dehumanizing rhetoric against regime opponents. Again, something already arguably fulfilled.

• A “state of emergency:” a suspension of civil liberties in the case of civil unrest or a terrorist attack. Invocation of Insurrection Act, troops on the streets of American cities. This is the “Reichstag fire” scenario. I think this would just simply prove the thesis, but not actually among my biggest fears.

• The use of questionable constitutional “hardball” to ram through executive actions and circumvention of the separation of powers, i.e. proroguing Congress and doing recess appointments of cabinet members. These are sort of yellow flags: this is strongman behavior, and concerning, but sort of generally authoritarian than necessarily fascist.

• An aggressive, jingoistic war to cover up a domestic failure. Trump’s supposed dovishness may come into play, but there are a lot of “neocons” in that administration already: if we intervene in Mexico to go after cartels, say, or pick a fight with Iran, I think fascism is back on the menu.

• Attacks on the rights of citizenship, in the form of abrogation of birth right citizenship and/or mass denaturalizations. This is a big one for me, as it would involve a suspension of the Constitution. Trump’s people want to cancel the 14th Amendment by executive fiat and then hope the Court ratifies this move. Big red flag.

• “Cultural fascism:” A marked uptick in hate crimes, interpersonal sadism, the return of the casual and routine use of slurs to humiliate minorities, etc. Sort of hard to test, but more a kind of atmosphere. If this other stuff is happening, I imagine the feeling in the country will get a lot uglier.

I’ll let the reader ponder these on their own, but I messed up in an important regard here: I did not anticipate the role of ICE as an organized, official mob, although the deportations were the obvious point of authoritarian pressure.

In this regard, I really think it’s worth looking again at the skeptical and even-handed analysis of political violence expert Dan Trombly, which I hosted on this newsletter:

In my estimation, the best prospects for a Trump-era fascist movement lies with some element of this dissident, semi-loyal clique, which will likely emerge and attempt to assert itself to push through those aspects of Trump’s agenda that are most reckless, unpopular, and potentially hazardous to other major power centers within the U.S. right. Immigration and mass deportations seem like a potentially fruitful area for such an approach - it is an issue area where far-rightists feel they have made a major political breakthrough and have a mandate for dramatic, harsh action, but many Republican officials and constituencies will be wary of the economic and social consequences. As right-wing fear-mongering about Haitians in Springfield, Ohio demonstrated, immigration is also an area where even groups at the extreme fringe of the right can attract attention from the mainstream and create rallying points that solve the more disorganized sectors of the far-right’s collective action problems of where and when to mobilize. Furthermore, mass deportations, attacks on birthright citizenship, and other hardline anti-immigration measures are more likely than many other Trumpist agenda items to elicit grassroots, street-level backlash to administration policy and its implementation.

I also think my short piece on “groyperfication” holds up well since everything we’ve seen coming from administration Twitter accounts:

Here’s the thing to understand: every single person under say, the age of 40 on the right is exposed to extremely high levels of groyper content every day in group chats, on their social media timelines, in discord chats, etc. Groyperism totally suffuses the cultural environment of the right. While mainstream media is still chasing after master figures and hidden intellectuals shaping elite consensus, the real story is that young righties look at the opinions and trends among the groypers as being far more interesting and important than respectable intellectuals. Many young righties in staff and media positions are essentially groypers or seek to emulate them as much as possible. For the right, they are both the avant garde and the masses. Groyperfication has created the kind of deformed democratic public sphere that Henry Farrell describes in his piece on the social media crisis. Like all publics, they are both something with real power and also something very amorphous and hard to pin down. They also want to provoke and troll, so it makes it hard to gauge their real influence. This all makes it an extremely difficult thing for the old-line media to understand and cover, but they need to try. If you’re an enterprising newspaper reporter: Enough stories about Curtis Yarvin, he’s behind the times: the real story is groyperfication.

Anyway, hang in there, guys. Things are dark, but I see better times ahead, too.