Weekly Grounding #82
Special edition on Trump 2.0
This week’s Grounding is a Special Edition on Trump 2.0 (see previous Special Edition Weekly Groundings here, here, here, here, and here). It features an assortment of pieces from a variety of perspectives, each of which I believe illuminates something important about the new administration. I hope you find this Grounding useful in making sense of the rapid developments during the past month.
For those of you who are new here, Weekly Groundings are published every Friday to highlight the most interesting news, links, and writing I investigated during the past week. They are designed to ground your thinking in the midst of media overload and contribute to Handful of Earth’s broader framework. Please subscribe if you’d like to receive these posts directly in your inbox.
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“Trump, the State and the Revolution”
At
, contends that the second Trump administration is engaged in the first revolutionary overhaul of the American state in nearly 100 years: “The most important and momentous change compared to Trump No. 1 is that he now has Elon Musk and his merry band of convention-breakers who are proceeding to the dismantling of the state apparatus. What they are doing under the title of the Department Of Government Efficiency seems novel for the people who have not had the experience or even the knowledge of any revolutionary change. The last such revolutionary change in the United States was done by FDR in the 1930s; it included smashing the old state, creating a new one and endowing it with multitude of new functions, most of which have endured for decades. It is Marxism 101 that if you have a revolutionary movement that movement in order to survive has to smash the old state apparatus and create a new. Marx wrote of that with regard to the Paris Commune: ‘The next attempt of the French revolution [the Commune] will be no longer, as before, to transfer the bureaucratic-military machine from one hand to another, but to smash [emphasis by Marx] it’ (Letter to Kugelman, April 12, 1871). Lenin later implemented it when he came to power. Without the control of the state apparatus every revolution is incomplete and in danger of being overthrown.”Milanovic concludes: “The revolutionaries’ objective is to take control of the apparatus of the state which under the specific US conditions means the personnel purge (as it did mean during the Chinese Cultural Revolution or the post-Communist transitions in Eastern Europe)…The battle that we see between Elon Musk and his supporters and different parts of the US state are the usual battles that we see when a revolutionary movement wants to leave a deeper imprint over the future.”
“American Strong Gods”
Milanovic identifies
as a chief ideologue of the Trump 2.0 revolution and points to this essay as an example of how such a revolution is explained and justified. Lyons writes at : “There’s a 2018 quote by the late Henry Kissinger that’s circulated recently, in which he mused about whether ‘Trump may be one of those figures in history who appears from time to time to mark the end of an era and to force it to give up its old pretenses.’ If that wasn’t true in 2018 it certainly is now. I believe that what we’re seeing today truly is the end of an era, an epochal overturning of the world as we knew it, and that the full import and implications of this haven’t really struck us yet. More specifically, I believe Donald Trump marks the overdue end of the Long Twentieth Century.”Lyons provides a panoramic history of the Long Twentieth Century, the ideological characteristics of “the open society,” and the entrenchment of the “the managerial state.” He seeks to explain “the great expansion of our modern managerial regimes, including the American ‘deep state’ that the Trump administration and Elon Musk are now trying to dismantle. Characterized by vast permanent administrative states of unaccountable bureaucracies, such regimes are run by an oligarchic elite class of technocrats schooled in social engineering, dissimulation, false compassion, the manipulation of allegedly-neutral processes, and a litigious ethos of risk-avoidance. The obsessive management of public opinion through propaganda and censorship also became an especially key priority in such regimes, with the objective being both to constrain democratic outcomes (to defend ‘democracy’ against the masses) and to generally suppress serious public discussion of contentious yet fundamental political issues (such as mass migration policies) in an effort to prevent civil strife.”
He continues: “Instead of producing a utopian world of peace and progress, the open society consensus and its soft, weak gods led to civilizational dissolution and despair. As intended, the strong gods of history were banished, religious traditions and moral norms debunked, communal bonds and loyalties weakened, distinctions and borders torn down, and the disciplines of self-governance surrendered to top-down technocratic management. Unsurprisingly, this led to nation-states and a broader civilization that lack the strength to hold themselves together, let alone defend against external threats from non-open, non-delusional societies. In short, the campaign of radical self-negation pursued by the post-war open society consensus functionally became a collective suicide pact by the liberal democracies of the Western world…Energetic national populism is, then, a rejection of all the core obsessions and demands of the twentieth century and the open society consensus that so dominated it. The passionless reign of weakness, tolerance, and drab universalist utilitarianism being held up as moral and political ideals seems to be ending. And that means the gerontocracy of the Long Twentieth Century is finally dying off too. This is what Trump, in all his brashness, represents: the strong gods have escaped from exile and returned to America, dragging the twenty-first century along behind them.”
“The Purge of the Deep State and the Road to Dictatorship”
At
, offers a perspective on Trump 2.0 that is diametrically opposed to Lyons’: “We are repeating the steps that led to the consolidation of power by past dictatorships, albeit with our own idiom and idiosyncrasies. Those naively lauding Trump’s hostility towards the deep state—which I concede did tremendous damage to democratic institutions, eviscerated our most cherished liberties, is an unaccountable state within a state and orchestrated a series of disastrous global interventions, including the recent military fiascos in the Middle East and Ukraine—should look closely at what is being proposed to take its place. The ultimate target for the Trump administration is not the deep state. The target is the laws, regulations, protocols and rules, and the government civil servants who enforce them, which hinder dictatorial control. Compromise, limited power, checks and balances and accountability are slated to be abolished. Those who believe that the government is designed to serve the common good, rather than the dictates of the ruler, will be forced out. The deep state will be reconstituted to serve the leadership cult. Laws and the rights enshrined in the Constitution will be irrelevant.”Hedges continues: “This deconstruction [of the state] is also, I suspect, about increasing Musk’s cloud capital, his algorithmic and digital infrastructure. Musk plans to turn X into the ‘everything app.’ He is launching ‘X Money,’ an add-on to the social media app, which gives users a digital wallet ‘to store money and make peer-to-peer transfers.’ A few weeks after the announcement of X Money’s partnership with Visa, DOGE requested access to classified Internal Revenue Service data, including millions of tax returns. The data includes Social Security numbers and addresses, details on how much individuals earn, how much money they owe, properties they own and child custody agreements. In the wrong hands, this information can be commercialized and weaponized. Musk is pursuing an ‘AI-first’ agenda to increase the role of artificial intelligence (AI) across government agencies. He is building ‘a centralized data repository’ for the federal government, according to Wired. Oracle founder, business associate of Elon Musk and longtime Trump donor Larry Ellison, who recently announced a $500 billion AI infrastructure plan alongside Trump, urged nations to move all of their data into ‘a single, unified data platform’ so it can be ‘consumed and used’ by AI models. Ellison has previously stated that an AI-based surveillance system will guarantee that ‘Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on.’”
“Wildfire Trump”
At
, addresses both those celebrating and mourning the “true goal of Trump’s governance” which “seems to be an end to the ‘left’ progressive/neoliberal social order”: “History is littered with the ruins of great plans, and the most ruinous of all have been those which relied upon government power to manifest them. Two things are equally true here, both collapsing into the singular figure of Wildfire Trump. The first is a warning to these new ascendant ideologues, and the other to the panicked souls mourning the death of the previous order: If you require an authoritarian strongman to manifest your destiny, then that destiny was never yours in the first place. And if a single authoritarian strongman can destroy an entire order of being, that order was never going to survive anyway.”Wildermuth continues: “Those putting their faith in Trump to recreate the world in their own image are making the very same mistake the faithful of the progressive/neoliberal order made. Cultural change cannot be forced or mandated through executive orders and policy papers, because culture is the field of human relations and not of law or police actions. The ‘culture wars’ of the past decade have all anyway taken place primarily in the cultural wasteland of social media, where people only mimic the true field of human creation. There is no religion, no family, no community, and absolutely no revolution to be had on the internet, only disembodied people masturbating over simulacra of such things. “
“Natalie Winters On DOGE, Elon, Rightwing Populism”
At Counterpoints,
and Emily Jashinsky interview Natalie Winters, a 23-year-old correspondent for Steve Bannon’s War Room. The interview is fascinating in a number of respects, namely with regard to the entry of Gen Zs into political journalism, the elite-to-populist pipeline in quarters of the New Right, and the feud between Bannon and Elon Musk, which I have covered here on Handful of Earth. The interview is well worth watching in its entirety.“For These 20-Somethings, Trump ‘Is Making It Sexy’ to Be Republican”
As we have seen, both Trump’s supporters and detractors have emphasized the radical and even revolutionary changes ushered in by Trump 2.0. This New York Times article tells a different story. The story is not one of working-class populist revolt or right-wing technocratic takeover, but, rather, the invigoration of wealthy, establishment Gen Z conservatives: “Mr. Trump’s younger supporters assembled on Wednesday night at Centurion New York, a members-only club on the 55th floor of a building in Midtown Manhattan, to celebrate the nascent Republican administration, and assert their fashionableness—and their fealty to the new president. ‘POTUS is making it sexy to be Republican again,’ said Max Castroparedes, 27, a self-described ‘international, globe-trotting consultant,’ who was using the acronym for ‘president of the United States.’ ‘He’s making it glamorous to be a Republican again. He’s making it great to be Republican again.’”
“Mr. Castroparedes, a former special assistant at the Department of Homeland Security during Mr. Trump’s first term, now works for Montfort, a company based in Palm Beach, Fla., that calls itself ‘a specialized strategic advisory firm.’ He had invited a dozen or so friends to assemble in a glass-walled room of Centurion, framed by sweeping views of the skyline, a soaring wall of wines and an imposing black chandelier.”
What grounded your thinking this week? Share in the comments.
What is it the American people want?