The Brooklyn Rail

Donald Trump may not be exactly a genius (not to mention stable), but he has accomplished something historically significant in the few months since he has returned to the presidency. He is “creatively disrupting” present-day institutions—political, economic, and ideological—to make way for a fantasized return to a glorious past of robber-baron exuberance and frankly imperialist resource-grabbing. Domestically, he is doing his best to fulfill the old Republican party goal of rolling back the New Deal, with its pesky regulation of business activity and minimal welfare measures. He is even going as far as possible to get rid of the income tax imposed in 1913, with tariffs proposed as an old-fashioned regressive substitute (along with opportunities for favor-trading and national wheeler-dealing). Internationally (“geopolitically,” to use Mahan’s term of 1890 so popular again today) he is insisting that the United States still has the power it used to remove the area now called Panama from Colombia in order to build the canal, or turn an ethnically-cleansed Gaza into a Trump-branded resort.¹ More significantly, he is bringing the curtain down on the Cold War, long after la commedia è finita. Along with these material changes come ideological ones: the end of the talk about “democratic values” and “human rights” so dear to the commentariat, and a frank celebration of old ideals of political dictatorship, national chauvinism, evangelical Christianity, and even the “traditional family,” however little relation they may have to reality. All these developments bring problems and dangers as well as opportunities; things will not go smoothly. But they absolutely represent a turning point, a response in practice if not in consciousness, to the end of the American century, and capitalist prosperity and progress itself.

MAGA did not erupt from nowhere: the dismantling of the welfare state, the decay of public infrastructure, and the abandonment of the “rule-based international order” have been proceeding for some time. Sweden, the homeland of postwar social democracy, has been a leader in the privatization of healthcare and other social amenities, along with Germany, France, and the UK, to name some major examples. Germany, once famous for trains that ran on time, is now competing with Great Britain for worst railroads. In the United States, Reagan’s undoing of the Great Society was continued by Clinton’s ending of “welfare as we know it”; more recently, momentary returns of government support, like the payments making life sustainable during the COVID pandemic, were undone as soon as possible. Here too bridges, dams, and tunnels fall apart, and even the air safety system, a business essential, is seriously understaffed and relies on ancient technology. The abandonment of “welfare” functions and public works in the eighties did not mean the end of state involvement in the economy: the national debt tripled under Reagan. But it was redirected to the direct support of corporations—increasingly, with the decline of manufacturing, to the support of financial institutions. As government involvement in the economy grew, it became itself a terrain of business competition, while politics became ever more of a business, with doors revolving between industries and their governmental subsidizers and regulators.²

Team Trump has accelerated this development. A subset of American oligarchs, from Texas oilmen to leading tech-bro billionaires, invested in his election and are being rewarded with large-scale deregulation and government contracts, with Trump and his family cut in on side-deals like crypto scams and favor-bank payments in the tens of millions. The pretense of the “Green Transition” is being abandoned, though it’s not clear that the production of fossil fuels can actually be increased beyond the levels achieved by the Biden administration, given the pressure this would put on prices and profitability. Beyond this, the .01% can enjoy the actual dismemberment of the Internal Revenue Service and watchdogs like the Consumer Financial Protection Board, along with the elimination of expenditures on “soft power” such as international medical aid and support for democracy (in other countries) funneled through USAID. The federal workforce will eventually not be cut by much, but it may be enough to scare the remaining civil servants into keeping any do-gooder instincts within acceptable bounds. Meanwhile the “gentry” whose votes made all this possible—concisely described by Jamie Merchant as “affluent individuals who are not rich by national standards, but are rich by local standards”—get to enjoy the victimization of “a variety of henchmen” threatening their well-being, “including Democrats, college professors, public school teachers, immigrants, Antifa, and Black Lives Matter activists.”³ Trump, Musk, and their pals among the oligarchs don’t like any of these people either, any more than they like troublesome Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives, probably not much more popular among white male job-seekers than Affirmative Action used to be. It’s unlikely that immigrants can actually be deported in large numbers, given the dependence on their labor of American agriculture, construction, and other industries; to what extent the partisans of individual freedom and conspiracy theories represented by RFK Jr will win out over Big Pharma and the food industry remains to be seen. But the basic point has been made: capitalism really is for moving money to the already-rich, not for providing affordable housing, food, and medical care to the working class.

The foreign-policy break with the past is even more striking. Ukraine provides a focused combination of Trump’s personal grievances—WHERE IS THAT SERVER?—with a relative shift from cant (“the free world” vs. “autocracy”) to Realpolitik (“We’ll take those minerals, you losers”). The struggle with post-Communist Russia over Eastern Europe, which came to a head in Ukraine in 2014, always raised the question, however unasked it was, of the relation during the Cold War itself between the menace of communism and the control of economic resources. I can believe that American strategists like the Dulles brothers really thought that capitalism, which had just come through a major crisis during 1929–1946 and “lost China” shortly after that, was under threat from the party-state systems in the East. But it also seems true that Stalin was ready to abide by the territorial split agreed at Yalta (as he showed when he abandoned the Communists in Greece). Business with the West might well have been managed with the Party in charge. Ho Chi Minh, eager to escape from Russian and Chinese domination, was likely sincere in his eagerness for Western investment and it’s conceivable that the Indochina wars could have been avoided if the US had allowed the Nikes of the time to set up shop in Vietnam (though it is true that off-shoring was not yet a business necessity for US industry).

At any rate, it’s clear today that Red China (as it used to be called) and Russia, however internally organized, are parts of the global capitalist system. The ongoing decline of that system has exacerbated competition between national and multinational entities, but there’s really no reason any longer to portray this in the ideological terms of yesteryear. China, a great economic power, is a major competitor with American industry; Russia, a minor one, may well offer a more attractive potential political-economic ally. Europe, stuck in economic and political stagnation, is being left to sort out its own relations with the Big Boys. The creation of a Eurozone military, probably not actually required to safeguard Greenland from US invasion, will at least provide some neo-Keynesian stimulus. Trump and the Trumpians, however ideologically blinkered (and just plain stupid) have decisively opened up the field of action for everyone.

None of this will solve the underlying problem: the stagnating, low-investment global economy. Finance, parasitic on industrial production, can only provide temporary paper fortunes; the system as a whole has become dependent on government spending and credit support, already on such a scale as to provoke fear that state borrowing is approaching its limits. It is economic decline, ongoing (through cyclical ups and downs) since the mid-1970s, that limits the welfare spending that it simultaneously makes more necessary, while emptying the globalized economy of its promise of advancement for all. In a reversal of the expected developmental trajectory, the First World—which has absorbed the former Second World—is moving towards the Third World model of an extreme concentration of wealth and political power in the hands of a small oligarchy. As the system generates less money, those who run it are taking as close to all of it as possible. Meanwhile, homelessness will grow and mortality rates increase, while fires and floods wreak physical and financial havoc. Despite Musk’s fascist salutes, Trump is not the second coming of Il Duce. He will not make America great again, any more than discharging trans soldiers and shifting funds from jet fighters to drones and a new, even more impossible Star Wars will up the “lethality” of the armed forces and ensure future victories.

But, perhaps just because he is neither a real oligarch nor a real politician, Trump can embody the merger of economy and government in a new dysfunctional form of state capitalism. It will probably not live long, but it will have done its work: clearing away some of the debris of capitalism’s long-gone golden years.