Between MAGA and a Hard Place

Two books — one on Steve Bannon and the global far right, the other on life at a Chinese university — reveal a world increasingly riven by ideological contestation. Fukuyama's "end of history" is most definitely over.

Benjamin R. Teitelbaum (2020). War for Eternity: The Return of Traditionalism and the Rise of the Populist Right. Penguin Books.

Daniel A. Bell (2023). The Dean of Shandong: Confessions of a Minor Bureaucrat at a Chinese University. Princeton University Press.

Published half a decade ago now, War for Eternity examines the rise of the new right, including the alt-right or “populist nationalist” movement, via key figures like Steve Bannon, Aleksandr Dugin, and a smattering of other far-right characters from across the globe. Sadly, the book remains even more relevant now, five years later, under Trump 2.0.

Despite the wide cast of characters, Bannon is really the key player here. The US edition’s subtitle underscores the book’s Bannon-centricity, “Inside Bannon’s Far-Right Circle of Global Power Brokers”—which is depersonalized in the UK edition, whose subtitle, “The Return of Traditionalism and the Rise of the Populist Right,” offers a more intellectualist, “history of ideas” framing.

Benjamin Teitelbaum sketches Bannon’s intellectual formation through his (apparent) encounter with Traditionalism, an obscurantist ideology that combines, in varying degrees, spiritualism, esotericism, occultism, reactionary conservatism, and racial supremacism, via key figures like the fascist philosopher Julius Evola and the mystical metaphysician René Guénon.

A breezy read, Teitelbaum’s book is at its best when offering a richly textured portrayal of Bannon’s worldview. Bannon was and remains—via his influential War Room podcast, CPAC speeches, and global networking—a key MAGA ideologue. Famously, Bannon was ousted from the first Trump administration in mid-2017 after falling out with the Trump family: Jared Kushner and Ivanka are denounced by Bannon here for wanting to “maintain the status quo,” with Kushner described as a “centrist Democrat” in Teitelbaum’s retelling.

Bannon’s formal removal from power hasn’t stopped him from remaining essential to understanding both Trump’s first and second terms—and hence the world we all inhabit. Teitelbaum has had significant access to Bannon, to a lesser extent the Russian writer Aleksandr Dugin, documenting (retroactively, through interviews) their first encounter in Rome in November 2018, which appears now as a key event in the growing interweaving of Putinism and Trumpism.

Coming to this book five years after its publication, War for Eternity now feels less relevant in the extensive sections on the far-right philosopher Olavo de Carvalho, a significant influence on Bolsonaro—if only because Brazil’s former president now is finished, politically, and because the country appears to have turned a new page with Lula since 2023.

More importantly, in places, Teitelbaum’s book feels just a bit too bewitched with its main character, as indeed other reviewers have noted. Bannon morphs into just plain “Steve.” The price of proximity and extraordinary access is the risk of (involuntary) glorification, and serving as a conduit for Bannon’s own propagandistic worldview and account of Trump’s first term. We are never quite told why Bannon would offer the author access to his “circle of global power brokers”—what’s in it for “Steve”? Could it be that he hopes to gain respectability, a serious platform for his dangerous, divisive, and destructive views? This is a constant dilemma in journalism. But in War for Eternity, proximity at times drifts into at least the appearance of entrancement.

There’s also the risk of sanewashing, or ex post facto rationalizing, an ideological movement that is, at its core, aggressively simplistic, premised on hardline nationalism and reactionary values. The intellectualization of “Traditionalism” produces the illusion of ideological depth and historicity. But maybe Bannon himself has it right: “I’m just some fuckin’ guy, making it up as I go along.”

A Dean of Illiberalism

The Dean of Shandong, styled as the “confessions of a minor bureaucrat at a Chinese university,” is an at-times amusing collection of somewhat trifling essays, written by the Canadian political theorist and long-time China resident Daniel A. Bell (not to be confused with the earlier American sociologist Daniel Bell). One of the essays, for instance, asks why Chinese political leaders have felt compelled to dye their hair (short answer: to maintain the appearance of youthfulness and vigor)—and why Xi now appears to have abandoned the practice (though he may be dyeing in streaks of gray, Bell notes). It’s a smart, Erving Goffman–style attention to sociological detail.

But behind its seemingly trifling qualities, there is a great seriousness here, for Bell, a scholar of Confucianism, offers a kind of Confucian apologia for China’s system of governance. It’s an at times sycophantic narrative, all the more efficacious coming from an outsider born and raised in a high-functioning liberal democracy like Canada: If one wanted to mount a defense of the Confucian-“communist”-capitalist synthesis that is contemporary China, this one-time dean’s unconventional essays would surely be just the sort of thing one would want to put out there: lighthearted, quirky, yet essentially reconciled with the basic ideological parameters of the state from which it arises.

Bell has lived in China for decades, employed first as professor at Beijing’s prestigious Tsinghua University (while eccentrically owning a Thai restaurant, Purple Haze, popular among expats in the Chinese capital), before being tapped by the mighty Organization Department of the Chinese Communist Party, which annually presides over millions of appointments in the country’s sprawling public sector, to serve as Dean of the Faculty of Political Science at Shandong University—a newer, provincial university, but still something of a promotion: Few Westerners have ever been hired as deans, Bell observes. (He has since moved on to Hong Kong University.)

Of course, one has to ask why Bell was chosen for this post. The answer probably isn’t solely academic: Bell is also an effective propagandist of sorts. While he avers to be critical of China’s political system—and there are asides on corruption, Uyghur and Tibetan repression, and the “possibility of a return to Maoist-style personal dictatorship” after the abolition of term limits in 2018, initiating the era of Xi—the book is, as noted, a concise defense of the Chinese system. Bell doesn’t try to conceal these aims. As he readily admits,

I do have an agenda and I should come clean about normative commitments. I worry about the demonization of China and especially of its political system. I think much thinking and policy making in Western countries is based on crude stereotypes about China’s political system, such as the view that the CCP exercises total control over intellectual discourse and there is no room for independent thinking. The reality is much more complex, as I hope to show.

And he appears willing to make some concessions to China critics:

I most certainly do not want to deny that increased demonization is related to worrisome developments in Chinese politics over the past decade or so. The CCP—to a certain extent—has become more repressive at home and more aggressive abroad.

Other reviewers have approved of Bell’s charge that, in the words of the Financial Times’s critic, “western critics of China are often ignorant of the pros and cons of China’s system,” nevertheless, Bell’s own qualifiers often seem like a hedge intended to preempt criticism of what remains his essentially illiberal stance. Bell is no democrat: Except at the lowest levels of governance (e.g., “village councils”), where the stakes are less significant, Bell thinks China’s system of top-down corporatist governance is superior to Western liberal democracy. And he wants to foreground the system’s Confucianism: Bell half-jokingly thinks the CCP should be rebranded the Chinese Confucian Party when engaging abroad.

Bell’s controversial 2015 book, The China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy, mounted a longer defense of the Chinese model of governance, which he describes as a “political meritocracy” (a normative ideal, Bell recognizes, that the country does not live up to), and dismisses Western liberal democracy, under the formula “one person, one vote.” In a TED talk outlining his position, Bell describes how his sister in Canada thinks him “brainwashed” after having living “too long” in China. But one could just as easily flip it around, Bell says, and claim that it is she who has been brainwashed from having lived in the West for too long. Demonization is never good, but this sort of equivocating misses the mark. (Bell is an oddly charming speaker, and he jokes that he hopes his sister never sees the YouTube recording of his talk.)

And while the twice-election of Donald Trump has given new force to Bell’s criticism of liberal democracy—in essence, the Popperian observation that such a system can run itself into the ground—it’s hard to see why the answer to liberalism’s potential for self-defeat should be to roll over and implement an authoritarian “meritocracy”: That’s cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face. Meritocracy, moreover, is rarely as meritorious as its advocates suggest; the term was invented as an essentially satirical concept in the 1950s by the sociologist Michael Young to skewer unfolding political developments.

In the face of liberal democracy’s frailties, surely the answer should be more politics, not less—including encouraging citizens to engage in the (civic) educative experience of activism, and the strengthening of public media and systems of public education. That’s how you make populations less susceptible to the “mind bomb” of Trumpist propaganda.

Removing the people from the political equation isn’t meritocracy; it’s a recipe for oligarchy, or rule by the few, and aristocracy. And that may be just what Bell wants: In closing, he even advocates for a China led by a “symbolic monarch,” selected from Confucius’s present-day descendants.

A World Divided

Two very different books, then: one broaching the ideological merger between Bannonite MAGA-ism and Dugin-inflected Putinism, the other a defense of China’s illiberal system of governance, packaged as a light tale of bureaucratic woes at a provincial university. Can they tell us anything about our current geopolitical moment?

Whatever the rest of the world might think about it, China is committed to all three elements of its ideological mélange—Confucianism, Marxism, and free-market capitalism. This seemingly self-contradictory yet socio-economically coherent and powerful system—a form of “Communist capitalism” with Confucian values—makes China the only real contender for present-day U.S. hegemony.

Moreover, Trump’s ideological allies are eager to forge a union of far-right movements—not only with Putin’s Russia but also with other countries and continents—to remake the world in their image, which includes countering, even crushing, China. Bannon is far from the only MAGA ideologue to champion this position—see, for example, Peter Navarro’s numerous anti-China screeds. The wheels are being set in motion.

Both books suggest—perhaps unintentionally—the very real possibility of an impending U.S.-China confrontation, already unfolding in the form of an escalating trade war, sparked by Trump’s recent tariffs. What makes this confrontation so dangerous—beyond the scale of people, weaponry, and productive capacity involved—is its fundamentally ideological, almost spiritual, nature. There’s no hatred like odium theologicum, the special animus directed at an opposing worldview.

But while these systems of thought are inimical to one another, a “clash of civilizations” was never inevitable: It only appears unavoidable now because of the specific people who have risen to power and the ideologies they’ve developed and come to inhabit.

Whither Europe?

Quite where this leaves Europe is unclear. Unless the European continent manages to counter the rise of the far-right at home—worryingly, a recent poll shows that the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is now Germany’s most popular party—Europe risks being swept up in a U.S.-Russia “spiritual union” under Trump and Putin.

Joining (economic) forces with China, as China itself has suggested in the wake of Trump’s tariffs, will be difficult given China’s professed “no-limits friendship” with Russia and its wider system of governance—though perhaps a pragmatist like von der Leyen will turn a blind eye to some of the issues and concentrate on trade and commerce instead; as The Economist notes, an EU-wide “rebalancing” may be in the works. Spain’s prime minister Pedro Sanchez’ proposed “pivot to China,” as Bloomberg describes it, with a visit to Beijing in the wake of the Trump tariffs, is a hint in this direction.

What seems clear is that we now inhabit a world of increasingly antagonistic ideological formations and geopolitical rivalries, with multiple possible configurations in the time ahead. The Fukuyamite hypothesis has most definitely been falsified: History is far from over, and a number of potential confrontations are now on the horizon. In this context, a Europe that (metaphorically) soldiers on alone—freed from a far-right “fifth column” at home, and managing to stave off Trump’s global MAGA machinations—seems increasingly like the sanest of outcomes. Whether that will be enough to sustain the better parts of liberal democracy in the long run remains to be seen.

What’s the Matter with Kentucky?

Are Trumpists found—or created? A ground-level report from eastern Kentucky by the renowned sociologist Arlie Hochschild only tells half the story of how Trump’s MAGA base came into being.

Arlie Russell Hochschild (2024). Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right. The New Press.

Why do people continue to vote for Trump?

Arlie Hochschild is an eminent Berkeley sociologist with half a century’s worth of experience, having invented key concepts like “emotional labor” in a 1983 study of service work, The Managed Heart, and the notion of a “second shift”—the domestic labor that is (still) disproportionately performed by women. More recently, Hochschild has published a 2016 study of the Tea Party movement, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, based on observations and interviews in Louisiana.

Now Hochschild has moved north. With Stolen Pride, Hochschild applies her signature brand of empathetic ethnography to try to disentangle the knot of Trump’s enduring appeal. Zooming in on an especially rural and red slice of America, Kentucky’s 5th congressional district and its constituent Pike County, Hochschild tries to unpack the mentalities and emotions underpinning Trump’s appeal in the region (and beyond). In the district we encounter here, KY-5, described by some as the “heart of Appalachia,” Trump won around 80 percent of the vote in all three of the last presidential elections. One way of thinking about Stolen Pride is as a kind of Hillbilly Elegy for the liberal intelligentsia, a Thomas Frank-style What’s the Matter with Kansas?, transplanted two states over and less economically, more culturally, oriented.

Good and Bad Bullies

The results, unfortunately, are mixed. Stolen Pride’s insistently restrictive framing of Pike County’s political psychology as that of a contest between “shame” and “pride,” brings to mind an amusing scene from the movie Donnie Darko, where one of the characters, a teacher, presents an idiosyncratic theory that all of life is a contest between “fear” and “love”—in other words, a reductive framing that misses much else of relevance.

In Stolen Pride, readers are told repeatedly that the fundamental problem facing eastern Kentuckians, and by extension Trump supporters in other (somewhat) economically backward areas, is one of a lack of pride and an excess of shame. They are unable to take pride in their economically depressed, coal-abandoned regions; they have been shamed for their refusal to adopt progressive cultural values, and they have been left pride-less by the machinations of “globalization.”

Enter Donald Trump, the book suggests, who alone has shown himself able to restore their pride and take away their shame. He is the “good bully” (p. 205), from the perspective of MAGA voters, willing to protect Kentuckians from the “bad bully”—a shadowy quadrumvirate made up of “the Democratic Party, CNN, the federal government (apart from the military), and the defenders of urban America who rudely dismiss rural America” (p. 206). End of story, more or less.

Narrative and Reality

But Hochschild never considers why key signifiers like “pride” and “shame” get freighted with the meaning they do: Why does pride in this region automatically entail “independence from government authority,” as one of her interviewees reports (p. 150)? Why does “shame” emanate from the closure of coal mines lying decades in the past when the rest of the postindustrialized world has moved on and become, precisely, postindustrial? And why wasn’t it Biden instead who was able to appear to these residents as the good “bully” (if we are to accept this schoolyard metaphor as meaningful way of thinking about high-stakes politics), who stood up to the bad “bully” Trump—a seemingly much more resonant, sensible framing from the left-liberal standpoint?

The basic problem with Stolen Pride is that Hochschild, by and large, doesn’t attend to the political and social activation of feeling as a “mass emotion,” steered and shaped by political actors and the media. Historians sometimes call this memory politics—in other words, how consciousness of the past is shaped and activated by political actors. And while there’s a great deal of shared memory and nostalgia on display in Stolen Pride, there is rather less reflexive questioning of the memory politics involved in propelling certain narrative strands to the forefront of the public mind.

In fact, right-wing politicians are left with very little communicative agency at all in this book: All they can do, seemingly, is to capture and project, bullhorn-style, the public’s preexisting feelings, uncovered at ground level. Trump and the vast communicative ecosystem surrounding him are not only strangely lacking in independent powers to persuade and give shape to public opinion, but are simply missing in action here, essentially nowhere to be found in the pages of Stolen Pride.

When Hochschild asks her interviewees about “the right’s deep story,” or overarching meta-narrative, she does not stop to consider who might be the storyteller in this saga. Who concocted and spread the “deep story”? Surely not eastern Kentuckians alone. When Hochschild implicitly asks us, as readers, to reflect upon the allure of Trump as “the good bully,” against the “bigger and badder” bullies of the “Democratic Party and the federal government,” the only appropriate response seems to be that of the very consternation Hochschild reports among her friends on the left:

Who was the first bully? . . . Wasn’t Joe Biden’s Build Back Better bill giving good jobs to people nationwide?

Indeed. There’s a “deep story” liberal-minded people could tell about a state like Kentucky as well—one in which the state’s economy is doing reasonably well, unemployment remains relatively low (5.2% statewide in December 2024, “lower than the state’s almost-50-year historical average of 6.5 percent,” as a recent policy brief notes), and where Andy Beshear, a Democrat, was able to capture the governorship in 2019— a fact which Hochschild alludes to in the concluding chapter but leaves largely unanalyzed.

We shouldn’t, of course, blame the messenger: Clearly, it isn’t Hochschild’s fault that her informants have bought into the lie of the 2020 “stolen election” or, more generally, hold reactionary views. And it isn’t the job of ethnographers, for the most part, to condemn their subjects.

But Hochschild does insist on Explaining Trumpism—behind this book’s pretense at anthropological particularity, it remains a sweeping argument about cultural driving forces in U.S. politics, concealed as fine-grained journalism. In her framing, Hochschild lends symbolic authority to ideas about “pride” and “shame” that are themselves the products of Trump’s own messaging. While Hochschild’s demand-sided account repeatedly suggests that there is an organic appetite for resentment in the population, a more supply-sided theory would recognize that the art of late-modern politics is about the creation and activation of resentments.

Hochschild doesn’t make room for this other half of the equation. In Stolen Pride, the author presents a micro-level view, without pausing to ask how narratives filter down from above and transform the view from below. Trump’s MAGA makeover of the American political landscape was the result of a relentless communicative bombardment, at all levels of the media ecosystem, from tweets and Truths to Fox & Friends. Hugging the ground provides only a partial glimpse of this wider story.

What Winning Takes

For Democrats to win elections in red states like Kentucky, one might think it would be enough to promise more economic populism and stronger reconstruction programs, including Ezra Klein-style abundance policies, as the historian Rutger Bregman has recently argued. Hochschild’s book also veers onto this ground, if not in so many words. If the central problem is that coal jobs have disappeared (inducing shame), the solution might seem to be to bring back jobs (producing pride).

The trouble is that both Biden and Harris already promised and pursued this sort of agenda to a significant degree. Biden secured $1.6 trillion in green and infrastructure spending; and while Bidenomics was hampered by the failure to pass Build Back Better, spin-off legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Act were clear attempts to strengthen the economic base. Harris’s 2024 campaign—though more moderate than her 2020 primary run when Harris supported more radical, sweeping legislation like Medicare for All—still promised around $5 trillion in tax increases over a decade aimed at corporations and the wealthy.

Clearly, this is not yesterday’s neoliberalism. Democrats learned from Trump 1.0, but also Bernie Sanders’s popular 2016 presidential campaign.

What Democrats couldn’t properly contend with was the toxic, decade-long MAGA-fueled inculcation of nativist, reactionary narratives that obscured their economic record and set tens of millions of Americans on a direct collision course with basic humanist values.

Perhaps this is a form of “stolen pride” Hochschild could give a hearing in future work: The once-proud belief in a uniquely American dynamism, driven by immigration and diversity; and pride in the country’s liberal-democratic values, from “checks and balances” to the right not to be abducted by plainclothes agents in broad daylight or deported to an offshore supermax prison without cause.

Yes, these ideals were always in part illusory: Internally a fractured and imperfect democracy, the U.S. was and is also an aggressive overseas imperial power. (Read Stephen Kinzer’s The Brothers for a capsule view of the postwar record, seen through the actions of John Foster and Alan Dulles.)

But both Americans and the wider world are coming to discover just how much even those purported values will be missed as they fade from view. It’s a sorrowful tale of something of great value that has been taken away from the world.

Millions of people are ashamed, too, to return to Hochschild’s parlance, that these things are now being stolen from them.

Reclaiming Narrative Hegemony

Shame isn’t necessarily all bad. Longing for the Confederacy’s defense of slavery, for instance, ought to induce a sense of shame. Part of the left’s cultural-hegemonic work must be to ensure that xenophobia, misogyny and other reactionary positions do in fact engender a proper sense of loathing—the sense that this sort of thing simply isn’t done. One could call this “identity politics” or “wokeism”; in other words, basic civility and humanism.

As the right cements its grip on power around the world, there’s a growing realization that the left needs to win the narrative war. Hearts and minds are being shaped daily by people like Joe Rogan and on platforms like TikTok and X. The left lacks its own counter-messaging apparatus attuned to these times. The cultural momentum has been lost.

What’s needed now is to reclaim lost cultural ground, build new narratives, and counteract the right’s successful messaging. Unfortunately, Stolen Pride, with its partial view and restrictive framing, offers little guidance for what comes next.

The AI Hype Bubble

And its cognitive, social, and financial risks.

The promise of Artificial (General) Intelligence is the greatest hype bubble this side of the new millennium.

Huge checks are being cashed on the promise of AI’s profitability. The chip manufacturer Nvidia currently has a market cap of 3 trillion dollars, making it the second-most valuable company in the world. Its bloated valuation stems in large part from the ongoing AI revolution, which has sent demand for graphics-processing chips like those made by Nvidia soaring. Meanwhile, OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, was valued at an astonishing $340 billion in early 2025. And there’s little sign that investments in the technology are letting up. Four tech titans—Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft—plan on pouring more than $300 billion into AI in 2025 alone. Clearly, there’s lots of loose capital floating around for those willing and able to get aboard the AI hype train.

But beyond the bloated market caps and overinflated investment drives—no different in essence from past speculative bubbles, from Dutch tulips to dotcom startups in the Y2K era, the“irrational exuberance” of stock overvaluation, in Alan Greenspan’s memorable phrase—a growing chorus is asking: Where is the value in AI, both in the narrow economic and wider social sense?

So far at least, the AI revolution has been characterized by two countervailing tendencies: on the one hand, an enormous willingness to invest in the booming AI industry (fueled in part by the fear of being “left behind”), and, on the other hand, extremely meager returns in any substantive, meaningful sense of that term. As the Boston Consulting Group noted last October, tackling the narrower financial meaning, “After all the hype over artificial intelligence (AI), the value is hard to find.”

Is AI making us more productive? Is it resulting in better-quality outputs? Is it solving real-world problems at a scale and with a degree of accuracy and quality commensurate with its significant energy usage and fiscal investments?

The answer to all of those questions, in my opinion, is no, and is likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. As the economist Daron Acemoglu has argued, AI’s productivity contribution will likely be no more than 0.5 percent in total over the next decade. “I don’t think we should belittle 0.5 percent in 10 years,” Acemoglu has said. “That’s better than zero. But it’s just disappointing relative to the promises that people in the industry and in tech journalism are making.” And it’s particularly disappointing given the trillions of dollars and hundreds of terawatt-hours AI-driven industries aim to absorb in the years ahead. As ever, we need to ask about opportunity costs: What might humanity have accomplished were these resources used differently?

By now, the Internet is chock-full of stories of how AI has failed to deliver in a social, less economic, sense. One basic issue is that of generative AI’s proneness to error. LLMs struggle with truth and with correspondences between text and reality. Hallucinations aren’t incidental to LLMs—they’re inherent. Hallucinations aren’t contingent bugs to be ironed out in some future iteration, given “better” data (but from where?): They’re an ontological, or necessary, feature of the tech involved.

Now, humans left to their own devices will always commit errors, and the tolerance for errors is itself variable: The range of acceptable error differs significantly for an AI (or a human) when writing a college term paper, say, or helping land a passenger jet, or detecting cancerous growths. Still, we may soon inhabit a Brazil-like world of half-broken technologies always in need of (impossible) repairs: In Terry Gilliam’s absurdist 1985 movie Brazil, we confront a dystopian future in which nothing works the way it ought to, its futuristic infrastructure held together by little more than duct tape, anarchic subterfuge, and a semi-resigned willingness to accept catastrophic error as a built-in feature of daily life.

Catastrophic errors, confidently pronounced, are likely to become our future as well. Last year, a Purdue study found that ChatGPT provided erroneous answers to programming questions in 52% of cases. What happens once those errors find their way into our society’s basic infrastructure?

More comically, I was recently scolded by ChatGPT for claiming that Donald Trump was president of the United States: “Trump is no longer in office,” the large-language model cheerily pronounced. But hallucinations are no laughing matter: They’re already having real-world consequences. A Norwegian man recently filed a complaint demanding that OpenAI be fined after ChatGPT erroneously claimed that he had murdered his own children. What if someone had acted on those mistaken claims? An Australian passenger traveling to Chile was recently told by ChatGPT that he would not need a visa to enter the country (“You can enter visa-free”), which was wrong.

In academia—a world that, at least in theory, revolves around the distinction between truth and falsehood—the effects are becoming particularly noticeable. University libraries are being overrun by students in search of fictitious sources— books and articles that simply do not exist—that have been recommended to them by chatbots. Worryingly, Los Alamos National Laboratory, which conducts research on sensitive technologies, had to warn its users against the threat of fake citations, including the “higher chance” of encountering “‘ghost’ or ‘hallucinated’ references” in published works. Back in January 2023, I called this AI’s propensity to produce “credible nonsense”—that is, plausible-sounding outputs with little or no connection to really-existing reality.

More what we read, including scientific publications, is increasingly shot through with AI-generated content. Here, for instance, is a book chapter published by Springer containing three instances of the ChatGPT-derived phrase “Certainly! Here is the translated text,” likely pasted directly from the platform’s prompt—just a tiny example of how LLM-speak filters its way into the intellectual sphere. Princeton University academics last year tried to assess Wikipedia’s proportion of AI-generated articles and arrived at an estimate of around 5 percent. Estimates of this kind will always be uncertain because of the essential camouflage of LLM-ed output, but it seems likely that the level of AI-written content will only increase. Worryingly, a Columbia Journalism Review-affiliated study found that AI platforms provided erroneous sources in more than 60 percent of the researchers’ queries. The CJR’s piece was titled, simply, “AI Search Has A Citation Problem.” Moreover, this error-proneness is a danger to AI itself: As LLMs begin to “ingest” synthetic but mistake-riddled outputs as part of their training data, the result may be be an “unintentional feedback loop” of ever-worsening outputs, as one researcher wrote in the New York Times last year.

More and more evidence suggests that AI will have ruinous effects on already whittled-away powers of concentration, reading, writing, and thinking. The “loss of decision-making” as younger generations increasingly come to rely on AI could plausibly cause a reduction in overall human intelligence.

The key issue is that we essentially hone our intelligence by engaging in intelligence-demanding activities; but AI reduces our need to do so (so-called cognitive offloading), and so, the chance to develop basic skills like wading through lengthy writings, summarizing lectures or reading materials, and writing unaided by technology. AI could be useful for older generations who have already developed the requisite skills but will likely wreak havoc on younger people’s cognitive capacities—and the world they will ultimately create and inhabit.

But in the near-term, the real risks from the AI hype bubble are financial, which is to say structural to the world economy. As the venture capital firm Sequoia Capital’s analyst David Cahn reiterated last summer: “Where is all the revenue?”. While Cahn had found that by late 2023, AI industries would have had to generate $200 billion in revenues, by the end of 2024, $200-billion-dollar question had now become “AI’s $600B question.” While Cahn ultimately believed “it will be worthwhile” and that “speculative frenzies are part of technology, and so they are not something to be afraid of,” others are not so bullish.

Ali Baba’s Joe Tsai recently warned of an AI data center construction bubble: Centers are being built en masse with an unclear customer base. Similarly, the billionaire investor Roy Dalio likened “investor exuberance over artificial intelligence” to the “build-up to the dotcom bust at the turn of the millennium,” the FT reported earlier this year. As an essay in The American Prospect on “bubble trouble” notes, “If the AI bubble bursts, it not only threatens to wipe out VC firms in the Valley but also blow a gaping hole in the public markets and cause an economy-wide meltdown.”

That’s a big “if,” of course. But the question is worth asking more forcefully than it has been so far. With hundreds of billions of dollars in AI investments slated for the next few years, there will have to be significant returns lest the hype bubble burst, leaving governments and the public to foot the bill for the inevitable post-implosion cleanup. Sleepwalking into a hype-driven meltdown just doesn’t seem very intelligent.

The Courts and the Street

Judges can serve as critical bulwarks against an authoritarian turn. But in the end, only grassroots organizing and a mass popular movement can truly withstand authoritarianism.

In mid-March, Trump surprised his political opponents by rejecting a series of last-minute presidential pardons signed by his predecessor Joe Biden, including those, in Trump’s menacing language, offered to “the Unselect Committee of Political Thugs, and many others.”

Posting on Truth Social, Trump declared that Biden’s pardons were “VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OF EFFECT.” As his presidency drew to a close, Biden offered a series of pardons, starting on December 1st with his son, Hunter Biden, and ending in a last-minute series of clemencies on January 19th, including Anthony Fauci, General Mark Miller, members of Congress serving on the Select Committee investigating the January 6 Attack, as well as members of Biden’s immediate family.

It was unclear which of Biden’s multiple pardoning rounds Trump was calling into question. But in so doing, Trump was undermining an executive practice enshrined in the Constitution and first used by George Washington in his 1795 amnesty for two participants in the Whiskey Rebellion who had been sentenced to death by hanging. Trump’s no doubt legally flawed argument hinged on the idea that Biden’s pardons were invalid because they “were done by Autopen,” a technology used by multiple presidents, allowing documents to be signed “auomatically” without the person’s physical presence. “In other words,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, “Joe Biden did not sign them but, more importantly, he did not know anything about them!”.

The “Autopen argument” drew on a Heritage Foundation report by The Oversight Project, published a week earlier and publicized by Fox News, though its roots appear to go back to 2011 when Republicans challenged Obama’s use of the device to sign legislation. “WHOEVER CONTROLLED THE AUTOPEN CONTROLLED THE PRESIDENCY,” the Heritage Foundation’s project announced on X. “We gathered every document we could find with Biden's signature over the course of his presidency. All used the same autopen signature except for the the [sic] announcement that the former President was dropping out of the race last year.” A week later, this claim was absorbed by the U.S. president. In a further Truth Social post, he announced: “The person who was the real President during the Biden years was the person who controlled the Autopen!”.

The Autopen argument seemed to allow Trump to accomplish three things: First, to further debase the reputation of the Biden presidency and reinforce the idea of a doddering 46th absentee president, one not in command of himself or the country, and subject to (potentially nefarious) external influences. Second, to send a signal to Trump’s political enemies that they might find themselves the targets of (political) prosecution (or rather, persecution). Sans protective pardons, Trump could instruct the Justice Department to begin investigating people like Fauci, which would likely be met with acclaim by Trump’s MAGA base. But third, the Autopen argument also seemed to allow Trump to preserve intact the presidential power to grant clemency, which might come in handy later in Trump’s second term, since Trump’s claims focused on a limited episode, not on the wholesale power to pardon as such.

But at least Trump recognized that the final word on Biden’s late-stage pardons would not be his:

“It’s not my decision — that’ll be up to a court — but I would say that they’re null and void, because I’m sure Biden didn’t have any idea that it was taking place, and somebody was using an auto pen to sign off and to give pardons,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on Sunday night.

So how likely is it that Trump’s charge would come into effect? Not very. As Bloomberg notes, a 2024 federal appeals court ruled that a “pardon doesn’t even have to be in writing.” The idea that an Autopen signature (and all seven Biden “warrants” from January 19th 2025 appear to bear the same, identical signature) would invalidate highly publicized pardons is legally laughable.

The Executive’s Privilege

In the February 2024 case referenced by Bloomberg, Rosemond v. Hudgins, a convicted drug trafficker, James Rosemond, serving multiple life sentences, claimed that Trump had granted him clemency in the course of several phone calls with his supporters: Trump had allegedly said that he “want[ed] to do this,” that he “want[ed] this expedited right away,” and finally that he wanted to “get this guy home for Christmas.” There was, however, nothing in writing, the Court of Appeals judge noted—no “warrant of commutation relating to Rosemond.” Rosemond’s lawyers claimed there didn’t have to be: The president’s verbal expression of clemency was enough.

Here the court agreed in principle (though without any practical consequences for Rosemond), and reaffirmed two basic ideas underpinning presidential pardons:

First, absent a constitutional constraint, the President's ability to commute a sentence is not subject to any further formal limits or requirements. Second, the Judiciary's role in the matter of executive commutations is very sharply circumscribed.

From the first principle, the court declared that pardons don’t even have to be written down; if asked whether pardons must be in writing, “the answer is undoubtedly no. The plain language of the Constitution imposes no such limit.”

From the second principle, namely that a presidential pardon belongs to the president and not the courts—“it is the President's prerogative to exercise it, not the Judiciary’s”—the court affirmed its reluctance to intervene:

We have no authority to fill the gap between President Trump's alleged desire to commute Rosemond's sentence on December 18 and his apparent failure to follow through with that intent in the final month of his presidency

Considering this ruling, we can see what thin ice Trump is on, legally speaking, in trying to overturn the Biden pardons. The exact nature of the signature, whether manually produced or the result of an Autopen, seems wholly immaterial; if it doesn’t even matter whether the pardons are written down, why should the exact nature of the signature matter? Moreover, a court is highly unlikely to overturn a presidential pardon once proffered, precisely because the power to pardon resides with the president, not the courts, albeit with some limitations (e.g. presidents don’t have the power to commute violations of state law; pardons are backward-looking and cannot “immunize future criminal conduct”). Trump’s understanding of the law surrounding presidential pardons appears slipshod.

Broadcasting and Battling

In this case, then, the courts are likely to “hold the line” against Trump’s inherent authoritarian instincts, and he is unlikely to be able to overturn Biden’s pardons. While Trump may still pursue a legal witch hunt against these (real or perceived) political opponents, he will not be able to do so through this route.

But as is so often the case with Trump, the messaging effect is far more important than the actual—in this case, legal—outcome. It signals his willingness to persecute his enemies and relays his tireless efforts to appease the MAGA base. Trump likely knows he won’t get anywhere on the Biden pardons. But he received tens of thousands of likes on social media, and reinforced the narrative of a weak Democratic predecessor. More importantly, the “Autopen affair” also joins a number of other actions that are wearing down a key bulwark against Trump’s incipient fascist authoritarianism: the court system.

Over the weekend, the White House ordered the deportation of hundreds of alleged Venezuelan gang members to an El Salvador prison, run by the crypto-fascist government of Nayib Bukele. The courts tried to intervene, but it was too little, too late. As the BBC reported, “A federal judge's order prevented the Trump administration from invoking a centuries-old wartime law to justify some of the deportations, but the flights had already departed.” Or as Bukele himself wrote tauntingly on X, “Oopsie… Too late 😂.”

It’s clear that the Trump administration, which in recent weeks has attacked higher education, now has its sights set on the legal system.

Bulwarks—or Compliance?

Both the Autopen affair and El Salvadorean deportation raise the deeper question of whether the courts are a reliable bulwark against Trumpist authoritarianism. Much now seems to hang on the courts and their capacity to resist Trump’s agenda.

Liberal democrats have long placed their faith in the rules-based order of the Rechstaat. For centuries, (lowercase-r) republicanism has emphasized the importance of the “rule of law” and, relatedly, the courts’ capacity to withstand a winner-takes-all politics, ensure procedural fairness, protect vulnerable minorities, and uphold legal rights against an overweening executive. Liberal democrats tend to see judges as buffers against strongmen and authoritarians of all stripes; and there can be little doubt that courts have, historically, played an important role in defending and upholding the rule of law. Just as fascists love to attack college campuses for their role as sites of ideological resistance, the courts are an important source of procedural resistance, threatening to obstruct executive authority by throwing grit into the machinery of power, which makes them a privileged target of authoritarian action.

But courts, being among the favorite targets of authoritarians, are also flimsy institutions, and they are receptive to the wider social context in which they act. The GOP and Trump have already packed the Supreme Court with right-wing justices: Republican appointees are now in a 6-3 majority. At lower levels, Trump appointed more than 200 federal judges in his first term, “including nearly as many powerful federal appeals court judges in four years as Barack Obama appointed in eight.” State supreme courts have also been “flipped” by Republicans through a decades-long process. Importantly, too, courts and the judges that lead them are embedded in a broader societal and political context. Courts are sites of ideological contestation and action, and are swayed by that context, over above who appointed whom to serve on the judicial bench.

In a landmark 1957 article, the political scientist Robert Dahl noted that the United States Supreme Court was both a legal and a political institution. By this Dahl meant, among other things, that the Court, except for “short-lived transitional periods,” would “inevitably [be] a part of the dominant national alliance” and “suppor[t] the major policies of the alliance.” Crucially, Dahl observes, “by itself, the Court is almost powerless to affect the course of national policy.” Meanwhile, in his (admittedly controversial) 1991 book, Hollow Hope, Gerald Rosenberg questioned whether the U.S. Supreme Court could be a reliable source of progressive social change. And as the critical legal studies scholar and Harvard professor Roberto M. Unger observed, while many affirm the “institutional competence” of the courts, there are good reasons to question it:

Most of what courts actually do—brokering small deals against a background of disputed facts and uncontested though vaguely conceived rights and supervising the police and prosecutors as they decide which violent members of the underclass to imprison, hardly fits those conceptions of institutional competence.

That is not to say, again, that courts cannot uphold the rule of law in crucial ways. Moreover, whether courts can withstand a wider authoritarian turn is a complex, and ultimately empirical, question. In the book, Can Courts be Bulwarks of Democracy?, Jeffrey Staton and his colleagues argue that U.S. democracy can likely be safeguarded by the courts, particularly if judges are willing to bear the risk of “non-compliance” and that which is “politically unpopular,” and if, conversely, civil society punishes political leaders who themselves exhibit non-compliance with court decisions. Of all the factors favoring courts upholding liberal democracy, the “presence of brave judges who are willing to exercise their powers is the most likely one to be met,” they write. The authors also suggest a strong civil society, “committed to advocating on behalf of courts, their judges, and judicial independence,” will likely contribute to standing the test of executive overreach.

Probing the Legal Order

No doubt Trump and his administration are testing the courts now, probing for weaknesses to exploit. To undermine the courts further through rhetoric or analysis would, in some ways, be to do the Trump administration's bidding. Still, the warnings offered by such intellectual movements as the Critical Legal Studies school against an overly exuberant faith in the court system to effect political change—or resist its reactionary subversion—remain salutary.

At the end of the day, courts are to some degree beholden to executive authority. The U.S. president wields astonishing power to change facts on the ground, often well before courts can react and respond, as illustrated by the recent El Salvador debacle: The New York Times rightly described the deportation and subsequent dismissal of a federal judge’s ruling as the Trump administration moving “one large step closer to a constitutional showdown with the judicial branch of government.” Trump is practically trolling the court system, goading it into provocation and a confrontation he likely believes he stands a good chance of winning.

But while many are right to continue to place their hope in the power of the courts to dampen Trump’s authoritarianism, only a mass mobilization of civil society at the grassroots level can shore up the courts and the liberal-democratic rights they, at their best, uphold. As jurisprudential theory and the sociology of law suggest, judges are responsive to ideological pressures, both from above—and below.

Judges are also unlikely to be able to go it alone. Only a popular mass movement, resisting both the dehumanization of out-groups and the extreme concentration of power in the hands of a single leader, can ensure the survival of liberal-democratic practices—for a democracy without people out in the streets, protesting and organizing, is likely to be a flimsy thing indeed.

Technofeudalism, Telecoms, and the Infrastructure of Control

Taking a closer look at two books — Yanis Varoufakis's 'Technofeudalism' and Eva Dou's 'House of Huawei' — reveals the deep entanglement of technology and politics.

Yanis Varoufakis (2023), Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. Vintage.

Eva Dou (2025), House of Huawei: Inside the Secret World of China's Most Powerful Company. Portfolio.

Yanis Varoufakis’s much-touted Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism is essentially built atop hyperbole: Varoufakis subscribes to the peculiar thesis that “capitalism is now dead.” By this he means that “its dynamics no longer govern our economies”—and while that takes some unpacking, in essence Varoufakis appears to believe that capitalism has now been “replaced by something fundamentally different”: the titular technofeudalism.

On Varoufakis’s view, rent (a notoriously ambiguous term) has replaced profits and markets have been replaced by digital platforms. Instead of profit, in the form of skimmed-off surplus value from wage-laborers, our new captains of industry, the techno-oligarchs, seek to extract “cloud rent,” a “form of rent that must be paid for access” to digital platforms, “and to the cloud more broadly.” Varoufakis deploys a cloud-heavy terminology: “Cloudalists” vie for control over “cloud fiefs” in order to exploit “cloud serfs,” aiming to build up their stocks of “cloud capital.” For as we go about our digital lives, Varoufakis thinks we are all playing the role of feudal-style serfs:

The most valuable part of the stock of cloud capital is not its physical components but rather the stories posted on Facebook, the videos uploaded to TikTok and YouTube, the photos on Instagram, the jokes and insults on Twitter, the reviews on Amazon or, simply, our movement through space, allowing our phones to alert Google Maps to the latest spot of traffic. In providing these stories, videos, photos, jokes and movements, it is we who produce and reproduce – outside any market – the stock of cloud capital.

One could just as easily flip the argument around and say that all the posts, texts, images, and videos flooding digital platforms would be economically worthless without capital. It isn’t content that makes capital, but capital that turns so many signs into “content,” which is to say, the capitalization of the symbolic. While it’s true that Meta would effectively go bankrupt if we all stopped posting on Facebook and deleted our accounts, it takes an awful lot of physical capital and labor to sustain the mediation of that content.

Varoufakis isn’t the first to have noticed the central role played by data or digital assets of various kinds under late-modern capitalism. Shoshana Zuboff emphasized the role of “behavioral surplus” in her 2019 bestseller, The Age of Surveillance Capital. Some academics have described the formation of an “asset economy.” Controlling the “vectors of information,” as McKenzie Wark has described them, is no doubt an increasingly important source of power and wealth.

But at their best, such analyses have been careful to note that data is just one piece of the overall puzzle of contemporary political economy; data may be important, but so too are the four billion tons of cement produced worldwide in 2024, to take just one example of capitalism’s continued hard material edge. While lots of people have written about notions like “information capitalism” or “digital capitalism,” rather fewer seem willing to write about cement capitalism, maybe because of a certain novelty-pursuing theory effect in the academic field, where analysts are always in search of the next new thing—a sensationalizing mechanism that tends to blow up phenomena disproportionate to their underlying reality. It’s all too easy for these theorists to forget that there have likely never been more industrial proletarians in the world than today; they just happen not to be, by and large, in the Global North.

Varoufakis’s overarching argument systematically undervalues the real materiality of still-existing capitalism, which certainly isn’t “all up in the cloud,” humming along in digital abstraction, but relies on physical infrastructure, from subsea fiberoptic cables to server parks, microchip foundries and computer factories. It ignores the huge amount of waged labor that is required to maintain even the digital infrastructure of “the cloud,” never mind the continuous industrial production that still takes place today, even in our “knowledge societies”; Meta alone employed nearly 75,000 full-time employees in 2024.

Varoufakis also seems to believe that while once upon a time capitalists cared only about profit maximization, our new digital overlords now seem more focused on market shares than profits as such—allegedly enough to have pushed us beyond capitalism. “The undermining of one capitalism’s core principles,” Varoufakis writes, that is, “the profit motive,” plays a major role in the supposed shift from capitalism to technofeudalism. But business historians have long known that maximizing market share and “throughput” have sometimes been far more important as guiding principles for capitalist enterprises than “the bottom line” as such. There’s nothing particularly postcapitalist about the prioritization of market share over profits: Market-share competition is just profit-seeking by other, more circuitous (and often necessary) means. The fact that many Silicon Valley enterprises have been able to forgo immediate profits, bankrolled by investors who take the long view, isn’t evidence of capitalism’s devolution into atavistic-yet-futuristic neofeudalism; if anything, it shows that smart capitalists are willing to delay immediate gratification for longer-term control and even greater profitability.

Varoufakis himself offers us the most succinct counter to his book’s core argument:

Is life under the cloudalists’ reign fundamentally different from living under capitalism? Are the cloudalists really so different from the capitalists that we need a newfangled term – technofeudalism – for the system we live in today? Why not just call it hyper-capitalism or platform capitalism?

Of course, Varoufakis goes on to answer the latter in the negative, though not very persuasively. But rebranding workers “cloud serfs” and capital “cloud capital,” or capitalism “technofeudalism,” does not a new mode of production or accumulation make. If anything, we’re more deeply embedded in capitalism than ever.

What Varoufakis does get right is his concern with the enormous concentration of power in the hands of a Silicon Valley owner-class. That’s worrying enough, and something we need to study and think about relentlessly in the age of Musk and Trump. But best leave feudalism out of it: It can only cloud our judgment.

* * *

If one wants to understand China’s economic rise since the new millennium, smartphones—and the networks and hardware they rely on—are not a bad place to start.

In the early 2000s, as 3G networks were being rolled out, China lagged far behind the West: The country didn’t launch its 3G networks until late 2009—more than six years after countries like the UK and Italy. Over the next decade and a half, however, China underwent rapid economic modernization, and by the time 5G technology matured, it had surged ahead of its Western competitors: By mid-2024, 5G connections accounted for more than 40 percent of all cell phone connections in China, compared with just 12 percent in France, and the country had roughly two and a half times more 5G base stations than the United States. If the smartphone is the beating artery of late capitalist modernity—the medium through which much of life is lived—China’s ascent to the world’s second-place economic power could plausibly be told through its transition from telecoms laggard to leader.

A key player in this transition is the controversial company Huawei, which has faced criticism for alleged links to Chinese human rights abuses in Xinjiang, security concerns over potential backdoors, its role in surveillance programs like the Great Firewall of China, and its business dealings in Iran, among other major issues raised.

Enter Eva Dou’s House of Huawei, a thorough, if at times plodding, journalistic account of how this once tiny electronics outfit rose from obscurity in the 1980s to become a global telecommunications giant by the 2010s, before being cut down to size by U.S. restrictions by the decade’s end.

House of Huawei is both a work of corporate history and a case study in political-economic policy. The Chinese state undoubtedly played a key role in Huawei’s rise, and the company’s controversial nature is indisputable, including extensive contracts in Xinjiang, where it participated in surveillance and control of the Uyghur minority population—part of a Chinese state crackdown which fifty-one UN member states declared to be “crimes against humanity.” Huawei also helped transformed the Beijing 2008 Olympics into one of the most heavily surveilled events in recent history.

Perhaps surprisingly, Huawei was at one point promoted by Western celebrities like Scarlett Johansson and Henry Cavill, who gladly posed with the P9 smartphone in 2016. Major universities like Stanford and Berkeley lined up to work with the company, before a moratorium was instated in the wake of intensified U.S.-China competition under Trump and Xi.

While China’s state-led growth model helped fuel Huawei’s rise, American neomercantilism—a term used by the political scientist Eric Helleiner in describing both China’s and Trump’s trade policies—also undoubtedly foreclosed Huawei’s rapid growth. As Dou observes in the book’s closing pages:

The US government has succeeded in halting Huawei’s rise. Huawei is no longer setting new sales records each year but is instead working to regain its 2020 levels. It is no longer expanding farther into the West but is instead defending its turf in emerging markets. The company has lost valuable R&D partnerships with US and European universities, which had helped drive its innovation.

Still, Huawei reported revenues of $118 billion in 2024, and U.S.-led actions against the company have hardly stopped it in its tracks entirely; its footprint in the Global South remains considerable, in part because of its affordable products. But Huawei certainly lacks the meteoric thrust it possessed only a decade ago.

As in the Global South, not all Western U.S. allies were equally enthusiastic about jumping on the anti-Huawei bandwagon. The European Union remains split, with only 11 out of 27 member states explicitly banning the company through the use of legal powers. In Britain, it wasn’t just that Brexit had made authorities hesitant to get embroiled in an economic dogfight with China, a key trading partner, even though it did eventually instate a 5G ban; the country also recognized the difficulties involved in establishing worthy competitors to Huawei:

One former senior British security official recalled a heated meeting at which a British minister demanded that they work harder with Five Eyes partners to build alternatives to Huawei. “What do you want me to do?” he said he retorted. “Do you want me to phone up Admiral Rogers at the NSA, or General Nakasone at the NSA, and say, ‘Do you fancy building a telco to rival Huawei?’

As Dou shows, launching Huawei onto the world stage took decades of investment, research, and development, propelled by government investments and support—a slow, steady expansion from its local foothold in Shenzhen to wider China and the world beyond. The story of Huawei, then, is also a tale of the hollowness of free-market ideals. Ours is an essentially neoliberal-and-neomercantile world: Trade and markets are continuously being forged and reforged by the state, often in illiberal ways.

Dou—a seasoned reporter for the Washington Post—notes that many industry insiders believe most forms of communication are already under some form of surveillance: “When AT&T conducted a survey of cybersecurity professionals in 2016, 64 percent said they did not expect to be able to have a private conversation on any device.” Given the nefarious power that control over telecoms hardware potentially offers states, Dou’s work prompts a reflection about the obverse side of the Huawei story, especially pertinent to global audiences after Trump 2.0’s apparent realignment with Putin: Should countries also be concerned about potential U.S. control over global telecommunications infrastructure?

The Specter of Inflation

The far right has weaponized the idea of inflation. We should critically examine how nationalist movements activate and manipulate ideas about economic hardship for political gain.

One frequently invoked explanation among progressives for the resurgence of far-right politics in recent times is inflation: Prices rise, food and energy costs go up, mortgages become more expensive, wages don’t keep up, and, so the story goes, as a consequence, working- and middle-class voters begin casting about for a scapegoat to blame for their economic woes. In short, economic pain pushes ordinary people into the arms of the radical right.

So too with Germany’s recent Bundestag elections in which the far-right party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) secured more than 20 percent of the vote. Only hours after polls closed, the economist Isabella Weber wrote on social media: “75% of AfD voters say they are very worried that prices are rising so much that they can’t pay their bills. Inflation once more fueled the extreme right.”

Weber had invoked the same explanation in accounting for Trump’s successful presidential bid a few months earlier: Two weeks after the 2024 U.S. presidential election, the economist claimed that inflation was “clearly the most important question for voters.” In an interview with French media, Weber reiterated that “Trump's election shows that inflation is a danger to democracy.”

She was not alone in making this claim. The morning after the November election, The Guardian’s economics editor Larry Elliott wrote an inflation-centered piece arguing that price increases had “helped secure [a] Trump win.” On Elliott’s view, “Trump insisted while campaigning that the economy was in poor shape, a message that resonated with many Americans unhappy about the increases in the cost of living during Joe Biden’s presidency.” Or as the Wall Street Journal’s chief economics commentator Greg Ip recently put it: “Nothing did more to deliver the White House to Donald Trump than inflation.”

It’s not (only) the economy

But while we shouldn’t deny the economic hardships that many ordinary Americans face, inflation-centered accounts of Trump’s return to the White House suffer from multiple flaws. First, the overall estimated 5.2% inflation rate under Biden’s presidency was hardly Biden’s fault alone; it was the predictable outcome of the trillions of dollars in necessary government spending on much-needed pandemic relief programs, but also the effects of pandemic-related supply-chain disruptions, energy and food price shocks from external causes like the Ukraine War, and the foreseeable result of a reopened world economy as the COVID-19 pandemic came to an end.

Second, and more importantly, inflation was largely under control by the time the 2024 election had arrived. By October 2024, the month before the election, the all-items price index had risen 2.6% over the last 12 months, hardly an earth-shattering level; and the 12-month percentage change of food prices in the U.S. stood at 2.1%, almost half of what had been the case in October 2020, the month prior to Biden’s defeat of Trump at the polls.

In 2024, U.S. voters had, of course, been through a period of high inflation under Biden, evidenced by the significant decline in real wages in the first half of his presidency; but by the end of 2024, real wages were back at their pre-pandemic levels.

In short, inflation wasn’t an “objective” reality that Trump could simply point to and allow to run its own course among the electorate. Instead, it was a constructed, spectral presence, which Trump skillfully repackaged along with other key elements of his politics, including anti-transgender attacks, nationalist nativism, and “culture-war” positioning, to snap up voters from the opposing side. As important as the “pure” economic effects of inflation may have been was the political activation of inflation as a weaponized signifier in the far-right’s battle against centrist neoliberalism. To claim that inflation was the “cause” of Trump’s rise, unadulterated by processes of communicative construction, would be to accept uncritically the far right’s own problem-diagnosis, falling prey to its propagandistic portrayals of social reality.

Again, this isn’t to say that ordinary people’s economic concerns shouldn’t be taken seriously nor that everything was rosy in the realm of the economy pre-November 2024. To take just one indicator: The top 10 percent of Americans controlled more than 70 percent of the country’s net wealth and nearly half of its pre-tax income in 2023, according to the World Income Database—an astonishing level of economic inequality that feeds into ongoing social pathologies. But even in the realm of “hard” economic inequalities, one could imagine a far-right movement tapping into and exploiting these differences for their own political gains; inequality is not in and of itself a “leftwing cause,” because it too can be weaponized by the right to devastating effect, as history has shown.

The German inflation conundrum

Returning to the recent German elections, there is a basic empirical issue with the inflation-centered explanation: A poll conducted by infratest dimap, published on election day, showed that when AfD voters were asked, “Which issue plays the biggest role in your voting decision?,” 38 percent answered “immigration,” 33 percent answered “internal security,” while only 8 percent chose “economic growth” and 6 percent “rising prices.” AfD voters, when pressed to pick their defining issue, largely didn’t opt for the economy, but chose either nativism or law-and-order concerns. And when all voters were asked the same question, only 5 percent placed inflation first; on this point, AfD voters didn’t diverge from the wider body politic.

Furthermore, as the chart below shows, as in the United States pre-November 2024, Germany’s inflation is nowhere near its 2021-2022 peak. So again, an inflation-centered account must consider how the memory and sensation of inflation were activated within political consciousness.

One could claim that while inflation might not have been number one on most voters’ list of self-reported priorities, including AfD voters, inflation could have contributed to the wider political-economic climate that in turn allowed immigration, nativism, and xenophobia to combine into a virulent stew. Inflation would then serve as the hard economic backdrop against which other “cultural” issues, like immigration or “safety,” could play out and rise to the forefront of public consciousness—on the thesis that an economically anxious population is more likely to be receptive to exclusionary messaging about foreign or non-native Others.

While it would be difficult to find clinching evidence for such mechanisms, economic issues weren’t unimportant to German voters: 53 percent of those polled reported that “I’m very worried that prices will rise so much that I won't be able to pay my bills,” while 48 percent were “very worried” that they would no longer be able to maintain their living standard, suggestive of real economic, inflation-driven concerns in half the voting population.

And while that might seem like definite proof of the inflation-as-backdrop idea, this risks getting the ordering exactly wrong: For what if it isn’t inflation that’s driving nativism, but nativist provocations that are fueling fears about the economy?

One suggestive piece of evidence in this direction is that while 48 percent of German voters were “very worried” that they wouldn’t be able to maintain their living standards, only 17 percent of voters were similarly worried that they would lose their job. Even more tellingly, while 83 percent of all voters rated the country’s economic situation as poor (schlecht), a whopping 67 percent of AfD voters reported that “My personal economic situation is good.”

These seemingly puzzling disconnects—between a sense of deteriorating “living standards” yet a simultaneous felt job security, and between the whole country’s perceived “economic situation” and one’s own personal economic situation—are the product of repeated messaging: about the “threat” of immigrants living on the dole, taking up precious public resources, burdening the welfare state, attacking the core values of society, spreading insecurity and criminality, and so on. Narrativization is the only sensible way of accounting for the fact that many far-right voters report feeling economically secure while simultaneously believing that the country is, somehow, collapsing around them.

Return to the discourses!

The problem with inflation-centered explanations for the rise of far-right politicians is that, without precision and refinement, they risk lapsing into a reductive form of vulgar materialism that fails to take seriously the communicative, symbolic, cultural, and discursive nature of politics. The domain of the political is also a language game, a game of signs, involving processes of symbolic construction, whereby issues do not merely “exist” out there in reality, in prefabricated form, ready to be plucked from the tree of ideology: Reality also has to be actively constructed by willing political agents; the sense of “what really matters” is also in part epiphenomenal to politicians’ processes of manufacturing and manipulation of our sense of reality.

In other words, discourses are autonomous, and discourses are not reducible to brute economic facts—if we can even speak of economic facts as independent from political construction and sense-making: Our perception of economic realities is always in part a product of how the media, political class, experts, and so on speak about the economy, and is not just a matter of how much money sits in one’s account or how much one has left over at the end of the month. We inhabit a world of mirrors, which is to say, a world of discourses.

As the anthropologists Vito Laterza and Louis Römer show in a recent essay, communication counts, and Trump’s 2024 campaign was rooted in a skillful process of narrative construction more than in “objective” economic realities:

During Trump’s 2024 re-election campaign, the momentum of the culture war helped him warp objective reality into a fantasy world where the American economy allegedly reached near catastrophic status, and migrants were to blame for virtually every ill of American society – from high housing costs to the opioid crisis, from low wages to gun violence.

Material realities count, of course, and this isn’t to deny the reality of economic pain that many ordinary people have experienced at the tail end of the neoliberal revolution that began with Reagan and Thatcher in the 1980s. But the realm of the symbolic isn’t just some superstructure to be dismissed out of hand. The game of signs, signifiers, and signification can take on a life of its own, even at times even becoming completely divorced from any economic base. Human beings are cultural, political, sign-making animals, and therefore almost infinitely malleable.

Again, this isn’t to say that economic facts don’t create a receptivity to particular kinds of messaging. At certain historical junctures, voting patterns can be heavily influenced by economic “facts.” But we ignore the autonomous reality of political communication at our own peril. Politicians can activate economic resentments by constructing narratives around the Other. Both Trump and the AfD in Germany (aided and abetted by Elon Musk) have fused economic anxieties with nativist resentments to great effect in recent months. We do ourselves a disservice if we reduce their labor of symbolic manipulation to a kind of economic determinism.

Fluid Fascism

Combining the concept of diagonalism with Zygmunt Bauman's "liquid modernity" allows us to better grasp Trump's flexible ideology.

Trump’s chosen ideology is what we might term fluid fascism, a remarkably flexible and adaptive ideological approach that cuts across the political spectrum and familiar divides, allowing the two-term president to engage in policy liquefaction: oozing from right to left and back again, fluid fascism lets Trump behave like a traditional military imperialist one day, promising to annex Greenland, Canada, the Panama Canal, and Gaza Strip, while the next posing as an antiwar peacenik, expressing a desire to slash Pentagon budgets via Musk’s DOGE, and to coordinate with Russia and China to “cut our military budget in half” by reducing nuclear stockpiles.

The political theorist William Callison and historian Quinn Slobodian have dubbed elements of this political style “diagonal thinking,” borrowing an emic term from the German anti-covid/alt-right’s notion of Querdenken (“thinking outside the box”; or more literally, “lateral thinking”), an eponymous, pandemic-era movement that embraced anti-vaxx ideas and conspiratorial reasoning. The Querdenkers, as they became known, became a kind of continental European branch office of QAnon, embracing the sort of anti-lockdown anti-authoritarianism that a facile critique of biopolitics—like that of the philosopher Giorgio Agamben—might invite.

Diagonalism denotes the recombination of left- and right-styled policies and positions, though with clear (far-)right-wing proclivities at heart; or as Callison and Slobodian put it, “diagonalists tend to contest conventional monikers of left and right (while generally arcing toward far-right beliefs).” There is an emphasis on the critique of power, both state and corporate, that clearly carries with it elements of the spirit of May ’68. And the self-image of rebellion and radicalism, or Foucauldian parrhesia (the courage to “say it all”), is not only borrowed but lifted from the left; it even goes some way toward explaining the identity crisis of the left today, for if the very notion of rebellion has been appropriated by the diagonal right, where does that leave the left? What psychological refuge might remain for those who have prided themselves on the carnivalesque atmosphere of “Occupy” or the “ruthless criticism of all that exists”?

Teflon Trump

Trump’s diagonalism remains his most powerful weapon. It allows him to order ICE raids on sanctuary cities, deport undocumented migrants to Guantanamo Bay, and denigrate Haitian-Americans in Springfield, Ohio, while at the same time widening his appeal among Hispanic voters and the “multiracial Right.” Who else in Western politics could get away with it? It allows Trump to dupe (some) Arab-American voters into voting for him, while simultaneously promoting a plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza and tightening the already historically close bonds to Israel and Netanyahu’s government. In short, diagonalism allows Trump to play all sides at once, cycling between seemingly contradictory positions without falling victim to charges of hypocrisy or self-contradiction, which for other politicians would likely have devastating consequences. Instead, diagonalism demands a hard-shelled obduracy; most people have too much essential decency to be able to play the diagonalist game: They see the obvious self-contradictions and lack the shamelessness required of a true diagonalist operator.

Is Trump’s apparent lack of a stable core merely a figment—a convenient illusion? Project 2025, widely described as the blueprint of Trump II, is an 887-page document that contains rather less “liquidity” than Trump’s self-presentation would otherwise suggest. Here are hard-edged policy recommendations and proposals, with very real, objective effects on the ground if implemented in full. But again, Trump is not slavishly following the blueprint; in some cases, he is already going much farther than its technocratic prose suggests. On USAID, for instance, Project 2025 suggests that the “next conservative Administration should scale back USAID’s global footprint by, at a minimum, returning to the agency’s 2019 pre–COVID-19 pandemic budget level”—but Trump and Musk seem more inclined to implement “plans that would all but dismantle” USAID, as the New York Times reports.

The fact is that while Project 2025 speaks repeatedly of a “conservative Administration” (a phrase appearing 71 times in the document), Trump II is anything but “conservative,” certainly in the strict sense of that word and the political tradition that underpins it: a traditionalist ideology aimed at conserving that which came before. Trump’s second administration is more like a radical insurgency, and insurgencies demand flexibility above all else; rigor would likely be their rigor mortis. Drastically reconfiguring the American federal state and realigning the global order in a “postliberal” direction are major undertakings that would seem to require a hybridized, fluid, fleet-footed approach. Trump will likely implement a good deal of Project 2025, as the Times has already shown, but there will be room for some distancing as well as an accentuation or aggravation of its core tenets; flexibility and an absence of essential constraints are key.

All That is Solid

In 2000, the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman published a groundbreaking work in social theory, Liquid Modernity, in which he tries (among many things) to describe a fundamental shift from the “hardness” of traditional modernity to the “lightness” of late modernity:

Travelling light, rather than holding tightly to things deemed attractive for their reliability and solidity - that is, for their heavy weight, substantiality and unyielding power of resistance - is now the asset of power.

Bauman took his “liquid” framework and applied it to a whole range of social and cultural issues. In the 2003 book Liquid Love, for instance Bauman suggests that something fundamental has changed in the realm of romantic coupling: No longer beholden to the ideal of lifelong marriages, Western culture increasingly invokes the ideal of short-lived, rapidly shifting relations, sometimes even virtual (or “electronic”) in character. While a bit dated now, the basic approach is clearly applicable even in our age of Tinder and company. As one interviewee Bauman cites says, “one decisive advantage of electronic relation[s]” is that “you can always press ‘delete’.”

Transitoriness over permanence, liquidity over solidity—this paradoxical “permanence of transitoriness,” as Bauman describes it, is not just the condition of romantic love (which can be exaggerated given the levels of marriage, stable coupling, etc.), but is taken to describe the basic condition of late modernity as such, filtering into everything from relationships to politics and work. In our working lives, the normative career is no longer that of a lifelong term of employment, but rather a series of shorter employment contracts, up to and including discarding the very notion of fixed employment altogether, so that we instead become “entrepreneurial selves”—project-based contractors or even hyperflexible gig workers toiling on (and for) multiple platforms.

Fascist Adaptability

So why should the politics of the world’s most powerful leader be any different? Trump’s fluid fascism is but the ne plus ultra liquidity of late modernity writ large—of course, pulled in a violently reactive, authoritarian direction that was never historically necessary but the outcome of contingent political struggles, in which centrist neoliberals failed to put up a sufficient fight.

The adaptability of Trump’s ideology is something he has in common with fascisms of the past as well; the historian Robert Paxton writes of the “malleability of fascisms,” which requires us to “study fascism in motion,” rather than view it as a fixed, static program.

In pushing a fluid, diagonalist politics, Trump has turned himself into the most formidable (teflon-coated) political figure in the world today, whose recombinant politics allows him to soak up broad demographic support and extract political profits from multiple contradictory positions.

It does not make his politics in any way unassailable. Naturally, the answer is not to respond in kind by turning into unscrupulous diagonalists ourselves. But it does mean that a successful counter-Trumpist pushback must avoid sectarian infighting and instead craft a broad-based coalition based on a politics of decency, against the inhumanism of Trump and his ideological allies. Times of profound crisis call for a politics of the popular front, in which all groups of good will, from radical leftists to the center-right, might join together in common cause to roll back the swelling tide of international fascism.

The Blitzkrieg President

Trump's first weeks back in power have aimed to disorient and demoralize—and so, to begin the work of dismantling liberal democracy.

We’re in the fourth week of the second Trump administration, and as many commentators have noted there is simply so much going on in U.S. politics—and therefore global politics: What happens on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in large measure shapes the world.

The Trump team’s frenzied first few weeks have clearly tried to induce a sense of overwhelm and overload in the population. His “blitzkrieg” start to his second term—a term used metaphorically for this short interval of intense activity that aims to overwhelm opponents and quickly achieve a predefined set of objectives—are a (not-so-subtle) attempt to disorient and demoralize the opposition.

In just a few weeks, Trump has promised to annex Greenland, Canada, the Panama Canal, and the Gaza Strip; threatened (and partly ordered) tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and China, and others, including 25 percent tariffs on steel and aluminium; tried to dismantle USAID and the Department of Education via Musk’s DOGE and his team of young engineers barely out of college; attacked transgender rights and the freedom of scientists to use particular words; and imposed sanctions on the International Criminal Court for its role in prosecuting Israel for war crimes committed in Gaza (Trump groundlessly claims the ICC has “abused its power” by issuing arrest warrants “targeting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Former Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant.”)

This dizzying array of actions is very nearly, to quote the title of a 2022 movie, “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” And that’s the point.

By all of these actions, Trump and his band of late-modern fascists would like nothing better than to induce a vertiginous sense of political fatigue, forcing a retreat back into purely interpersonal relations: They seem to be counting on people to withdraw into more comforting spaces, away from the churn and anxiety of an endlessly hectic news cycle manufactured by Team Trump.

The German philosopher Hegel envisions social life as being divided into three “moments” or stages: the family, civil society, and the state. There’s also an implicit reverse-hierarchical ordering at work here: all three are necessary, but the family involves “ethical life” (Sittlichkeit) in its merely “natural or immediate phase,” civil society sees ethical life in its conflictual “division and appearance,” while only the state is capable of rendering “freedom universal and objective,” gathering up all the competing claims on the social order and arriving at some form of judgment.

Trump aims to dominate the state to redefine the meaning of terms like freedom, and other central goods, in line with his own twisted sociopolitical vision. But he also seeks to pollute civil society to such a degree that only “the family,” or domestic sphere, becomes in any sense inhabitable to ordinary citizens. Trump and his cronies are trying to engender a retreat from a toxic political society to the realm of merely domestic comforts (such as they are when enveloped by late-modern capitalism and an incipient fascist authoritarianism), so that these groups will cease to struggle over control of the state. In other words: to disorient, demoralize, and demobilize—and so, to lay the groundwork for the demolition of liberal democracy.

What is to be done? Retreatism certainly won’t help. Of course, self-care and reconnecting with friends and family are always worthwhile, so long as one doesn’t have any illusions about their longer-term political value.

Instead, any opposition will also have to match and mirror the Trump administration’s frenetic pace. The only way for the opposition to counteract the Trumpist blitzkrieg is with a blitzkrieg of their own, using all available, peaceful means, from legislative action to street-level organizing and social-media activism, to mass protests and general strikes (such as “Days without Immigrants,” demonstrating the economic contributions of groups denigrated by the far right). A better future still remains within our potential reach.

The New Fascist International

A growing club of far-right, hardline nationalist, and fascist political leaders is working hard to transform the world. They must be opposed.

Is fascism today essentially internationalist—or is it made up of a series of discrete, nationally bounded projects?

Looking around the world today, it’s hard to escape the sense that fascism has become an internationalist project and one that transcends familiar geopolitical blocs and transnational coalitions: The new Fascist International cuts across NATO and BRICS, the West and the Global South, drawing in actors from all major geopolitical camps to form a multinational coalition of far-right, hardline nationalist, fascist-adjacent and outright fascist political actors.

Congealing around a set of shared ideological commitments, the movement encompasses leaders and governments ranging from Javier Milei’s Argentina, Meloni’s Italy, Israel’s Netanyahu government, Hungary (Orbán), the United States (Trump), India (Modi), and Putin’s Russia, to name its most visible exponents. But in addition, there are (sizeable) parties vying for power, like Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), polling in second place ahead of Germany’s 2025 federal elections, and one-time leaders like Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro or the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte.

Xi’s China occupies a more ambiguous position vis-à-vis this new axis, even as it remains undoubtedly authoritarian, with the treatment of Xinjiang’s Uyghurs constituting a serious human rights violation, to take just one example. China’s position as the world’s second-place economic power and its distinctive ideology—a Confucian-inflected “Marxist Nationalism,” to use Kevin Rudd’s descriptor, coupled with an advanced form of neoliberal capitalism—make it something of a case unto itself: It announced a “no-limits friendship” with Putin’s Russia, to be sure, but has since backpedaled to a degree; and it is locked in an antagonistic economic relationship with the Trump II administration, one of the “superspreaders” of global fascism.

Of course, a present-day Fascist International doesn’t involve a literal organization acting in unified, lockstep fashion. Instead, the term draws inspiration from the historical attempt by elements within Mussolini’s regime to form a “fascist international,” in an attempted imitation of the Communist International, exemplified by a 1934 conference in Montreux, Switzerland hosted by the Mussolini-affiliated Action Committee for the Universality of Rome (CAUR). Instead, today’s Fascist International is characterized by what Ludwig Wittgenstein termed a “family resemblance.” In his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein writes that the concept denotes the “various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, color of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. [that] overlap and criss-cross in the same way.”

So, too, with the global family of far-right, hardline nationalist, and fascist leaders: Their commonalities give rise to certain affinities—a generally shared alignment—rather than any perfectly synchronized coordination. Like in all families, there will be differences and even outright conflicts; still, its members feel the bonds of their family resemblance, orienting their ideas and inclinations, both domestically and on the world stage, to a shared ideological purpose. Little wonder, then, that Trump’s first invitee at the outset of his second term was Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu, with India’s Modi set to follow close behind.

What are the common denominators of this increasingly self-assertive, global ideological formation? They include (i) an emphasis on strongman leadership and rule by “states of exception,” (ii) the ever-present threat and actual use of both (military) force and economic coercion to realize a nation-centered agenda, (iii) hardline (ethno)nationalism, fueling rampant xenophobia targeting out-groups and designated “common enemies,” (iv) aggressive propaganda campaigns aimed at spreading traditionalist, reactionary notions about gender, race, sexuality, and religion, and relatedly, (v) a deep preoccupation with the body, above all women’s bodies, and the (heterosexual) family, as well as biological and therefore social reproduction.

Fascism is an ideology of selective life and targeted death. It elevates particular social groups that it deems worthy of the gifts of societal support, welfare, life, and joy—while other portions of the population it devalorizes and deems unworthy, stigmatizing, criminalizing, or ejecting those regarded as social refuse from the body politic, at the utmost limit dehumanizing and subjecting such categories to (lethal) violence. As Jason Stanley points out in How Fascism Works,

The dangers of fascist politics come from the particular way in which it dehumanizes segments of the population. By excluding these groups, it limits the capacity for empathy among other citizens, leading to the justification of inhumane treatment, from repression of freedom, mass imprisonment, and expulsion to, in extreme cases, mass extermination.

In this sense, Gaza is but the laboratory of fascism (though underwritten and armed by Biden’s Democratic administration for some 16 months), its terrain devastated by an extreme right-wing government; Gaza offers a clear demonstration of fascism’s capacity to inflict death on a captive people even in the twenty-first century. Gaza is a premonition, a potential future, as we face the globalization of extreme nationalisms, a paradoxical agglomeration of movements and leaders that, on the one hand, glorify their own Nation and the People said to belong to its Soil, and, on the other hand, seek out a perverted form of international solidarity—allies with which to bond, commiserate, and bolster their ideological cause.

This does not mean that the Fascist International cannot be resisted or that its victory is in any sense guaranteed: Its endpoint is far from necessary in any ontological-historical sense. But if its paroxysms of violence are to be avoided, the new fascisms of our age, wherever they may appear, must be resisted with every ounce of our strength and using all peaceful means available to people of good will—as activists and intellectuals, labor unions and political parties, religious groups and NGOs. The Fascist International has the potential to produce untold catastrophes; there can be no compromising with this dark and disturbing force that once again threatens to overshadow the world, now technologically augmented and globalized like never before.

Highlight the Contradictions!

Trump's coalition is filled with contradictions that threaten its stability. The Left should highlight these weaknesses while advancing a bold vision of its own.

There’s an old adage attributed to Napoleon: “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”

Trump’s first week back in the White House saw him assert his newly reclaimed authority: The 47th president fired off dozens of executive orders, appeared before a variously starstruck, cowering Davos audience, confidently mapped out his administration’s focus on Fox News’s Hannity, and, after threatening a full-blown trade war, reportedly forced Colombia, the U.S.’s premier ally in South America, to accept planeloads of deported migrants.

But the opportunities for Trump to “make a mistake,” in the full Napoleonic sense, are rife in the years ahead: Trump may appear strong, but he presides over a remarkably unstable coalition, which could splinter, fracture, and weaken in the years ahead. The risks shouldn’t be exaggerated: Part of Trump’s formula for success is his ability to cut across the political spectrum and bring divergent groups together, but the risks, or opportunities, are real—and the Left should stand ready to highlight and thereby sharpen the contradictions that will bring them into play.

Contradictions and Animosity

Trump’s alliance is fragmented. It includes MAGA white supremacists, tech oligarchs, Wall Street bankers, traditional enterprise, military-industrialists, Christian evangelicals, suburban professionals, disaffected minorities, the economically dislocated, and others. These fractions often disagree on how to deal with a wide range of issues, from foreign interventions to immigration and the state’s economic role. Their material interests, moreover, often diverge: What’s good for Trump’s Wall Street backers might not work in Rust-Belt residents’ favor, and the interests of Silicon Valley do not necessarily align with those of MAGA nativists.

In addition, the personal animosity that Trump brings to all his transactional relationships (and they’re all transactional at this point), often leave behind a trail of acrimonious accusations in its wake, with high-turnover positions to be filled with ever-new candidates. As Bob Woodward’s analysis of his first administration showed, Trump’s belligerent stance and amateurish grasp of the process undermined the efficacy of his administration. It didn’t prevent him from overseeing 2017 tax cuts costing $1.9 trillion—a major victory for the forces of neoliberalism—but it was a spectacular form of self-sabotage. Trump’s pugilism (and love of golf) will work against him.

This triple combination of antagonistic material interests and fundamentally divergent worldviews within the Trump “big tent,” as well as Trump’s own personal prickliness and temperamental failings, could prove fateful. A smart, strategic, and savvy Left might exploit the three—antagonism, divergence, and temperament—to create the conditions needed to roll back the global tide of far-right politics, whose epicenter today increasingly is 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

MAGA Nativism and Silicon Valley

To take just one example of the cracks already beginning to appear in the Trump camp’s facade: In December, a public spat broke out over H-1B visas between Elon Musk, representing the tech wing of Trump’s coalition, and the more directly ethnonationalist wing, represented by figures like Steve Bannon and Laura Loomer. Musk, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur dependent in part on foreign skilled labor, has profited from the existence of the visa program. The “America First” wing, meanwhile, sees in H-1B visas a threat to its nativist vision for the American working class.

A week before the inauguration, Steve Bannon accused Musk of trying to implement “techno-feudalism on a global scale,” using a term first coined by the leftwing economist and politician Yanis Varoufakis. Speaking to the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, Bannon pulled no punches in describing Musk: “He’s a truly wicked person. Stopping him has become a personal issue for me. Before, since he put so much money, I was ready to tolerate it. Not any more.” Bannon went on to claim that the “entire immigration system is gamed by the tech overlords, they use it to their advantage, the people are furious.”

A week earlier, there had been further evidence of the rift on Bannon’s War Room podcast. In an episode on December 30, Bannon attacked Musk and the “tech oligarchs.” Bannon was in a fighting mood, claiming that “the MAGA movement,” after helping secure Trump’s comeback, was not going to “just sit there and roll over while the country’s torn apart by oligarchs—it’s not gonna happen.” He paid lip service to Musk’s accomplishments, but was clearly hostile toward his stance on skilled labor migration:

And I always give full respect to Elon. Elon was absolutely central. […] He did write the check and that gets him a seat at the table. I said that from the beginning, although I fundamentally disagree with him on major issues like the Chinese Communist Party, like transhumanism and like the situation around immigration. […] The H1-B visa program is a total and complete scam from its top to the bottom. And Elon’s put out this tweet that, you know, all his companies have depended upon that.

A few days earlier, Vivek Ramaswamy, a pro-Trump entrepreneur set to collaborate with Musk on the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), had defended high-skilled labor importation in a post on X: “Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence…Trump’s election hopefully marks the beginning of a new golden era in America, but only if our culture fully wakes up.” For anyone with ears to hear, Ramaswamy was making the case for bringing non-U.S. tech workers into the country.

If the Musk-Ramaswamy alliance appeared like a Big Tech wedge in an otherwise MAGA-dominated Trump camp, less than a month later, their DOGE collaboration had already faltered, as reports surfaced that Ramaswamy would be running for governor of Ohio. If it wasn’t a falling out or a rupture within the tech wing of the coalition, it at least appeared haphazard and unplanned, coming mere hours after Trump’s accession to office.

We still don’t know the final outcome for the H-1B visa program. Amidst “sweeping crackdown on immigration upon his return to office this week,” Trump “left unresolved” the visa rift, the New York Times reported. “It’s unclear where Mr. Trump will land. He pledged in his first term to discontinue H-1B visas, but last month he called it “a great program.” But if there’s a lesson to be learned from the H-1B debacle, it’s that the Trump camp is not impervious to some serious infighting.

Of course, even “Silicon Valley” or Bannon’s “technofeudalists” are not a monolith within Trump II. For evidence, look no further than the early squabbling over Trump’s $500-billion AI initiative, Stargate. Here, too, Musk’s loose-cannon approach and financial interests—against OpenAI, one of the parties to the agreement—seemed to undermine the president’s agenda: “They don’t actually have the money,” Musk wrote on X. One of the initiative’s backers, SoftBank, “has well under $10B secured. I have that on good authority,” he wrote. There’s potential for even greater, fractal-like fragmentation, then, within each of the sub-groups that make up Trump’s coalition, as tech billionaire opposes tech billionaire.

Some of the reported conflicts within and around Trump II may be exaggerated: Musk, for instance, very clearly offered a “Roman salute” during his speech at the inauguration and has offered vociferous support for Germany’s far-right party, Alternative für Deutschland, suggesting that the tech billionaire is not without hard-right, ethnonationalist sentiments of his own, even as he appeared to clash with Bannon and the MAGA-ites earlier in the month.

The False Harmony of Fascism

Still, Trump sits atop something like a volcano—the impossible-to-resolve contradictions at the core of the “America First” program. When Trump says, “We’re gonna put America first, always put America first,” as he did in a recent speech to Republican lawmakers in Miami, what does he mean? Is it the America of Elon Musk, or the America of the unemployed (and underemployed)? The America of Mexican immigrants, of transgender people? The America of J.P. Morgan’s CEO Jamie Dimon, with his $39 million annual salary, or the America of the minimum-wage worker making $7.25 an hour?

Picking apart the very idea of “America” invoked by Trump reveals how it contains within it multitudes whose interests cannot simply be forced into a harmonious whole. Society is made up of real antagonisms: Musk and Dimon want things that wage-laborers do not necessarily want; Musk may want things Dimon does not want; the financial elite’s need for transnational financial flows may clash with the interests of rural MAGAs. The potential for fracture is abundant.

Fascism was always a movement that promised to resolve such antagonisms, forging a false unity by externalizing impossible-to-resolve contradictions onto some (allegedly) alien Other, like Jews or the Roma. The fasces in fascism denoted the bundles of sticks that symbolized authority in ancient Rome—in the twentieth century, “fascism” entailed the corporatist bundling together of divergent, opposite interests under the aegis of the state, which promised to unify labor and capital into a congruous whole. But this must remain an exercise in futility, which will either collapse in contradiction, or forge ahead at the cost of great violence towards an externalized group, forced to pay the price for attempting to bring together what cannot be held in union—like the great erupting force of two repellent magnets clamped together, which must finally explode outward.

When we say that Trump is a fascist, then, this is not merely a rhetorical exercise; he is a fascist in the strict, formal sense of attempting to hold labor and capital together in an impossible union, potentially at the cost of great (physical or symbolic) violence directed at some some marginal category-of-the-week, to be picked upon and subjected to harsh state treatment, whether Haitian-Americans, or radical Episcopalians, or undocumented migrants.

The Value of Silence—and Analytical Militancy

Returning to our Napoleonic beginnings, the Left could learn a lesson from how the Trump camp responded to Biden’s apparent cognitive decline around the time of the presidential debate in the summer of 2024: Trump simply let Biden and the Democrats stew in their own discontent and strife. Notice, too, how silent the Trump camp went: “‘We're trying something new and shutting up,’ is how one source described the Trump team's strategy.” Sometimes radio silence can be just as effective as breathless commentary on day-to-day events.

But the Left should also be unafraid to offer its specific brand of analytical militancy, relaying information about real tensions within the Trump camp, while reframing the issues on which Trump’s coalition is faltering and failing, to demonstrate where the U.S. president’s promises not only fall flat, but contain impossible contradictions that therefore cannot be solved within the framing Trump and his people offer. The Left should do so while mapping out a positive vision of its own, boldly—and sincerely—promoting an agenda of peace, justice, ecology, and equality.

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First published on The Theory Brief (theorybrief.com).