My full post-election analysis was finally just published in Aspenia. It’s now available online – one of only two articles available virtually this issue. You can still read a synopsis and some excerpts from the first half of it in my prior newsletter, here.
Rather than give you a synopsis of part 2, as I originally promised, however, I want to do something a little different in this newsletter, using the Aspenia piece as a point of take-off. Because, in just the last few weeks, a number of national and global events have (at least in my view) confirmed its basic analysis – in fact, the larger argument I’ve been making for the last nearly 20 years.
I want to synthesize for you much of that larger argument into an overall understanding of the trajectory I think we’ve been on – and why I think that means that we might now, despite all appearances, be finally turning a corner for the better.
Most folks have thought for years that I have been unduly pessimistic about the direction of politics and world affairs. Now, most concede, rather gloomily, that I was basically correct. I say this not to take a victory lap – I’m as unhappy about it as the rest of you – but because there has been an overarching theory behind what I’ve been saying and thus why I think it has turned out to be correct. That theory has more to say about where we’re headed from here, and, again, it runs contrary to what most people apparently expect – in a good way.
In recent weeks, most people I know – and probably most of you – have grown increasingly pessimistic as a result of Donald Trump’s re-election. The early news from his emerging administration essentially confirms all the worst expectations. So I want to try to provide a glimmer of holiday cheer: While this is not yet the end of the Time of Troubles we’ve been experiencing lo! these 20 years, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, we have moved beyond the beginning, and even the “end of the beginning,” and are now beginning the “beginning of the end.”
THE BEGINNING: WHAT I THINK HAS BEEN GOING ON THE LAST 20 YEARS
Since Trump’s re-election, there has been much talk about whether or not we’re in the midst of a political “realignment.” In fact, party realignments are a major and generationally recurring feature of American political history; we are now entering what most historians would consider the seventh such “party system” over the last 232 years.
While most people associate this with the rise of Trump, this realignment was already beginning with the election of Barack Obama nearly two decades ago. Obama tapped into, personified, and accelerated the Democratic Party becoming a high-income, post-industrial, multicultural, globalist party supportive of an activist state. This increasingly has left working-class and rural Americans, alienated from the direction the world was headed and disenchanted with virtually all establishment institutions including government, to coalesce within the Republican Party. Trump was the first politician to recognize and seize upon these trends to forge a new political movement.
In early 2015, a friend started musing to me over dinner about Nazi Germany and “why societies go crazy.” It was an intriguing question in general – one I subsequently taught a class on and which plays a central role in the book I’m now writing – and quickly seemed somehow to capture the zeitgeist, coming as it did only a few weeks before Trump descended the golden escalator to launch his presidential candidacy based on the need to wall off our country, expel immigrants, tear down an entire “rigged system,” and destroy the “enemies of the people.”
Many further developments seemed to be reflecting this general theme of a world going crazy: A rising threat to traditional liberalism – essentially, tolerance for others and patience with differences – around the globe, but particularly emanating from Russia, China and Iran. A growing reaction globally to the economic changes that culminated in the Great Recession. The increasing conviction of traditionally dominant groups in the U.S. – whites, males and Christians – that they were the true victims of these changes and the increasing turn by these groups to legal and political strategies previously employed by liberals to vindicate their newfound protected status as “minorities.” (Most of my prior writing on these topics can be found at https://www.usnews.com/topics/author/eric_schnurer.)
I began writing more urgently about this after that “why societies go crazy” conversation. For instance, that very fall, an abrasive, megalomaniacal, outsider businessman scored a surprise, upset win in the gubernatorial election in Kentucky, presaging a larger turn in the country, and in fact – combined with the populist uprisings in Europe and the rising anarchy in the Middle East – the world as a whole. After attending a welter of international conferences in early 2016 – in both Africa and Europe – I became more convinced of the coming global tide: By the time of the Brexit vote, it came as no surprise, nor would Trump’s impending election.
After Trump’s victory, however – and the election of similarly authoritarian-minded leaders in countries worldwide – it became conventional wisdom that we were living through a global turn against democracy. I believed the opposite, though: People, in their anger and frustration were turning against liberalism but most people, most everywhere, still supported democracy. That was an important distinction.
The reason, which I’ve spelled out most fully in “Democracy Disrupted” in The Hedgehog Review in 2022 (and forms the first half of my book), has two parts: (1) We’re living through a time of technological change on a par with the Agricultural or Industrial Revolutions, but one happening much more rapidly, which will undermine everything about our current world – the nature of government, countries, the economy, family and private life, everything – engendering tremendous levels of disruption and backlash. (2) Every era reflects its dominant technology, and the salient aspects of today’s emerging technologies are (contrary to most people’s perceptions of them as centralizing and authoritarian) to break things apart and to undermine all authority. Thus, as just a few examples, we were about to see nation-states ripped apart, the creation of individualized realities, and tremendous social anomie and dislocation.
I believed that we were in for a very difficult decade or two, but that, eventually (and within a generation) we would – probably – come out on the other end into a better world. I believed there was something of a sell-by date for all the anger and disruption caused by the world-historic transformation we were living through. In short, I was pessimistic about the short-term – but optimistic about the long-term. I think – improbably, you might say – that we are now reaching the midpoint, or bottom, of that cycle and starting to see glimmers of the path back up. The difficulty lies in getting there. (That’s the second half of my book.)
THE END OF THE BEGINNING: THE RETURN OF TRUMP
Donald Trump’s personality, objectives, and effect fit almost perfectly with the digitally-induced deconstruction of all existing institutions I just described. My resulting, admittedly contrarian, take on Trump from the beginning has been that as much as he may have authoritarian instincts – and have surrounded himself with truly authoritarian ideologues (what I refer to in the Aspenia piece as the “Second Estate”) – his interest is not so much authority as enrichment.
While the fears of many that Trump will end democracy and institute a fascist government are not without foundation (including Trump’s own promises to become a “dictator on Day One” and to “suspend” the Constitution), I’ve never thought that was his main objective or his major threat to the country: They are, rather, good old-fashioned kleptocracy and that his regime would leave the United States not a fascist state but a failed one. Trump’s modus operandi is more that of corporate raider or vulture capitalist than true entrepreneur, and that carries over to government.
Already, we are seeing that in the nascent transition: The appointment of in-laws to ambassadorships (and, coming soon, the Senate). The announcement by the Trump family that they won’t abide by even the limited ethics from Trump’s first term constraining their financial dealings with foreign countries. The continued commercialization of everything the new King Midas touches (I thought he couldn’t top his post-election $10,000 autographed “Trump Guitars” offer, until he issued a new Trump-branded fragrance so allegedly manly that even Jill Biden swooned for him at – sacrebleu! – the reopening of Notre Dame Cathedral).
It’s clear already that anything in the government not nailed down will be carried off and sold, and this extends beyond the royal family itself (the “First Estate”) to its monied aristocracy. Trump is stocking the government – not just the Cabinet, but all sorts of specially-created positions like his new “crypto czar” – with fellow billionaires who hold a personal pecuniary interest in the areas of government of which they’re being put in charge. That, of course, is simply traditional (if “bigly”) graft and grift.
What is, instead, truly original in Trump’s staffing choices to date is the predominant theme of giving over major sectors of the government to people who have little experience or interest in them other than explicitly to tear them down: Kennedy, Hegseth, Goetz, Patel, Gabbard, Oz (no, not the Wizard…) and endless others are being appointed for the sole reason of destroying the agencies they head. Elon Musk has been put in charge of an “efficiency” effort – on which you can read my full take in this piece recently published by Governing Magazine – whose all-but-announced aim is to privatize to Musk the regulation and oversight of those activities of minor public concern (the future of transportation, space exploration, intelligence gathering, national defense, satellite communication, war-making) in which Musk has gargantuan financial investments.
Again, it’s important to understand that Trump’s corruption of government (in the original Latin sense of cor- “thoroughly” -rupio “ruptured, broken, destroyed”) is qualitatively, not just quantitatively, beyond anything we’ve previously experienced: The government is being entirely eliminated as a public concern – a res publica, as the Romans called it – and not so much to be “privatized” as to be turned into a vacuum that private interests can fill if they please, or not, much like the libertarian paradise of Somalia. The ultimate end of Trumpism, then, is, and always has been, the privatization of force itself: The impending pardoning of thousands of January 6 convicts will be the foundational act of Trump’s personal praetorian guard, surpassing even his first-term attempts to create such a vehicles via ICE enforcement agents. In short, Trump’s conception of government is not Hobbes’ Leviathan but rather the State of Nature to which a Leviathan supposedly was the answer. None of this should be surprising – the proper parallel to Trump is neither Hitler nor Stalin but Mao Zedong, who had a deep-seated compulsion toward not so much communism as (like Trump) chaos.
The natural result of this divestment and devolution of the state is growing civil violence, as Weber’s “monopoly of legitimate force” is returned to society at-large. Like much in the Trump era, this bizarre prediction has become almost conventional wisdom over the years. But, as with the raiding and implosion of the instruments of governing, I am surprised at the speed with which this is occurring post-election. The recent, brazen murder of United Healthcare’s CEO – which will prove less significant than the public reaction to it – is only the beginning; the killer, it turns out, was pursuing a political agenda that borrows broadly from both left and right, and has triggered an outpouring of public sympathy for further violence against the ruling elites that is, as discussed in the first half of the new Aspenia piece, what the Trump movement is essentially all about. (That’s the “Third Estate.”) As I’ve said for years, yes, there will be blood. That this reaction clearly unites extremes at both ends of the political spectrum, however, is the most salient fact about it.
All of which must leave you asking, How in the world can I say that I’m optimistic about the future?
THE BEGINNING OF THE END?
Let’s look at recent events abroad before returning to our own doorstep. In just the last three weeks, one of the many authoritarian wannabees – in South Korea – attempted an outright self-coup much like that which most imagine Trump has in mind; it failed dismally within hours, and not for lack of the military joining in the attempt: Courageous parliamentarians, as well as everyday citizens, rallied to stop the effort in its tracks. Of course, South Korea had the advantage that we lack of courageous parliamentarians, including amongst the president’s own supporters, who valued the Constitution over power or party. Almost immediately thereafter, the murderous regime of perhaps the world’s worst dictator, Bashar Assad, came crashing down in a matter of days as even his own forces deserted him. This, along with the disastrous fallout from Hamas’ strategically fatal murder rampage against Israel a year ago, has essentially destroyed most of Iran’s proxy forces and dramatically weakened the aggressive and repressive regimes in both Tehran and Moscow. In the latter capital, Vladimir Putin is now throwing human waves – some imported from North Korea – against Ukraine in a race against his own collapsing demographics and economics to try to secure a favorable negotiating position for when Trump takes office. Meanwhile, voters in three different would-be Russian satellite nations have been voting and rallying against Kremlin interference in their democracies.
It's been a bad month for dictators and (except here) a generally good one for democracy.
There’s one other current foreign development I want to point out before we return our gaze homeward, and that is the fall of the government in France. This was a pointless charade of politics at its worst, and leaves the country adrift, but it was brought about for a unique reason: Forces on both the far-left and far-right made common concert over stopping the government’s austerity budget. Since the 2008 financial crisis that gave rise to the growing anti-liberal populism that has swept much of the world, the right everywhere has advocated for government austerity; the one place this did not succeed was in the United States under Barack Obama – and, as a result, while one would hardly know it from the dissatisfaction levels amongst US voters, America today has the healthiest economy in the world. US Republicans are still benightedly clamoring for austerity as a cure for the nation’s alleged ills; meanwhile, right-wing populists elsewhere are realizing that their own voters actually want government spending. (They just don’t want to pay taxes.)
More significantly,the right and left ends of the spectrum hold a common antagonism toward elites of all sorts, including the monied and corporate types. If they were to move beyond the cultural and identarian division that has been central to the political backlash of the last decade, they could form a new populist movement focused on economics holding the potential for a new political realignment. Events in France may indicate that this is finally occurring.
As argued at some length in the new Aspenia piece – and in my Aspenia Online article immediately after Trump’s win – the future should lie with a middle- and working class economic movement, of the type that the Democratic Party used to be. Such a movement could command an electoral majority, but would require moving around and recombining certain parts of our current political DNA not unlike the peeling apart and reassembly of the biological double-helix; this involves reuniting working Americans across racial lines in a new anti-establishment majority that spends less time worrying about the concerns of the college educated than does the current Democratic Party. Not only do we see this starting to happen in the French Assembly – it is the underlying reality of Trump’s 2024 election.
In a recent post-election interview with Ronald Brownstein of The Atlantic, the Biden-Harris campaigns’ high command argued – as many Democrats are now desperately asserting – that Trump’s win does not really represent a political realignment. They might even be right – so far: Trump’s increased support amongst certain demographics, at least percentage-wise, appears to be more a mathematical function of persuading millions of people, particularly young men and minorities, who voted against him in 2020 to stay home out of disaffection with the Democrats – not an absolute increase in support for Trump. But Democrats, instead of hoping still to stave off such a realignment by somehow winning back more relatively upscale suburbanites, ought to be encouraging a realignment – before a right-wing populist alternative, some bizarre right-left amalgam of RFK Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, and Luigi Mangione, becomes the chosen vehicle for populist economic anxiety by default.
There is an opening for doing so, because the emerging Trump 2.0 is turning out to be a lot crazier – and, as a result, a lot less effectual – than I feared. As I noted in the first half of the Aspenia piece in my prior newsletter, the U.S. is lagging behind the rest of the world in moving past the right-wing, illiberal tide of the post-Great Recession era: Several years of failed right-wing policies have started souring people across most of the globe on the notion that these cooky nostrums represent some sort of meaningful alternative to what is wrong today. The search is on – so far, unsuccessfully – for something better than continuing to pretend that the 20th Century welfare state is a suitable answer to the very different challenges of a 21st Century tectonic technological shift on a par with the Industrial Revolution itself. We (barely) voted out Donald Trump in 2020 before he could have his full Liz Truss moment of imploding the entire economy with ideas from the conservative lunatic-fringe faster than the decay of a head of lettuce. That has allowed his return – but he and his minions are surprisingly hard at work trying their best to top that. In Aspenia, I gave it six years; as promised, however, Trump is moving even quicker.
So, yes, I am optimistic. I think we are seeing the beginning of the end of the Time of Troubles that started over a decade ago but which still has, perhaps, a decade to run. I believe as I have for a long time, for a number of reasons (you’ll need to read my book to get the rest), that where we come out on the other side will be a much better, if much different, world.
But that isn’t guaranteed. In the next few months and years, some serious extremists will do their best to turn this country into an unrecognizable parody of itself, and to so paralyze the institutions of democratic government – especially the 19th and 20th Centuries’ expansions of the franchise – as to ensure that no mere election can ever dislodge them from power again. Merely accepting this is unacceptable. As I replied to a friend, a long-time leader in Democratic politics, who told me last month that she was losing hope and ready to give up, “Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
We can, and we must, create a better world for the next generation. The moral arc of the universe is on our side; to quote a favorite speech of mine by a favorite speechwriter, Bob Shrum, “Our cause is right, our hopes are bright, and our day is coming again.” That doesn’t mean trying to go back to some mythical past we have lost – on the left any more than on the right – it means moving forward and keeping our eyes on the goal: a saner, fairer, more caring world for all.
Happy New Year,
Welcome to substack. I’ve read much of your work in other places. Lots of potential threads to pull on here and in your work overall. One I’m having trouble with is this assertion: “In short, Trump’s conception of government is not Hobbes’ Leviathan but rather the State of Nature to which a Leviathan supposedly was the answer.” I don’t think this is what Trump is about at all. He’s too weak of a person to ever want to live in or preside over a state of nature. I think, in the longish term, he and his coalition are about simplifying governance not doing away with it. His model is pretty clearly that of the mob boss: it’s all about a stacked marketplace (political, economic, etc.) of transactions and tributes designed to enrich and empower himself, and then, as needed, whoever else he wants. The chaos he is unleashing (and always has) is about defying and undermining norms, and bringing cathartic WWE-type experiences to his populist “suckers” such that he can then impose his personal preferences about order on the country (largely based on patronage). He wants anything but the sort of conflict that could ruin his day. He wants to be able to watch his suckers on TV ruin their own lives wrecking things. He wants to turn our governance into something that’s comfortable and safe/fun for him — not like the White House or even his New York penthouse — but more like a modern-day palace: like Mara-Logo.
I believe what you are attributing to Trump is far more likely to be on the agenda of someone more like Musk, who really does want to rule the country, the world — and then the solar system. Of great interest is going to be how those two sort out their very different and incompatible visions for our future. The Trumpian vision will be far easier and less bloody to deal with than Musk’s.
For the first time in my longtime use of this favored phrase, I use it without sarcasm: Bless your heart.