No matter how well-matched a couple is, every relationship brings with it some kind of compromise. In our household, one such compromise has resulted in me being a near scholar of the survival reality show Alone. I’ve hated camping for as long as I can remember and, in general, share Socrates’s preference for the city over the countryside. My Esteemed Partner is not the opposite by any means, but she would probably like to do more outdoor activities than we actually wind up doing. When we discovered Alone during the pandemic, that created an important release valve. She gets to indulge her fantasies of roughing it in the wilderness, while I get to apply my “always-on” analytical mind to a show that is in fact almost a parody of neoliberal individualism.

The premise is simple and cruel, taking the “skills-based” reality show paradigm to its logical limits. Contestants are dropped off in the remote wilderness, in the same region but far distant from each other. The winner is the one who is able to endure the isolation and deprivation the longest. All the contestants are in some sense survival experts, in many cases either living off the grid, providing instruction in survival, or both. Hence they have many skills that can help them extract some kind of living from the land. But few have the experience of extended periods of complete social isolation — perhaps we see here why the show became a hit during the pandemic? — and all of them are tormented by a complete lack of knowledge as to how many other contestants are still going and how long they may have to hold out.

Winning does not require holding out against death. Contestants receive periodic medical checks and can be extracted if their condition has dangerously deteriorated. (To my knowledge, no contestant has actually died, but part of me wonders if someone has and they just never showed the footage or acknowledged their existence.) Instead, they are holding out against the temptation to give up — an ever-present option. They are equipped with a satellite phone that allows them to “officially tap out,” the term of art for giving up. Within the space of an hour, a team shows up to film them sharing the vital life lessons they have learned from the experience and then to clean up their hard-won shelter so that it is as though they were never there.

The post-“tap out” filming is an exceptional moment — up until then, the contestants must film themselves. We occasionally get a glimpse of the quite imposing suitcase full of camera equipment they have to lug around in addition to their survival gear. Sometimes this gives them an advantage, for instance using the camera’s light for other purposes or setting up motion-detecting cameras to track animal habits. I assume that they have enough downtime that the work of setting up the shots, etc., doesn’t become excessively burdensome. But I suspect the act of filming is a double-edged sword. It gives them an imaginary friend to talk to (one contestant this year constantly addresses the camera as “you guys,” by which I assume she means the home audience), but sometimes the irony of constantly performing for an absent interlocutor seems to promote the inevitable spiral into abject loneliness.

I’m sure there is a lot to say about the subcultures that have grown up around the show, its effect on survivalist circles, the almost uncanny recurrence of the theme of a man leaving his very pregnant wife behind to be on the show, etc. I don’t know anything about that — I just know what I see on screen. And what I see is so perfectly, sublimely ideological that I almost suspect that Adorno is an executive producer. The surface-level content of the show is radically individualistic. Each of the contestants is completely isolated and forced to rely on their wits, their knowledge, and the limited kit of survival items they have cultivated. The contest appears to be a pure meritocracy, judged not by a fallible human being but by nature itself.

Yet seldom has there been a less “natural” setting. They are undertaking a task no human being has attempted or even would attempt. The places they are forced to survive in have, as far as I can tell, never been permanently inhabited by humans. Had they chosen to live there, they would not have done so in radical isolation, but in a group. There are no indigenous lifeways that involve shivering alone in a makeshift shelter north of the Arctic Circle or hunkering down under a tarp in the middle of a freak rainstorm in the South African desert. The scenario is, in short, completely contrived — it would only “really” come up as a result of a highly technologically-mediated event like a plane crash.

And their existence is itself highly technologically mediated. Their “tap out” phones depend on a network of satellites connected to the GPS system. They have an elite medical team on call at a moment’s notice. And the reason we can even see what they are doing is that they have a wide range of camera equipment — including extremely durable batteries and advanced solar cell technology — to capture them as they essentially generate endless video “content.” The material they are filming will be distributed on cable and streaming networks, but what they are doing is not essentially different from a TikTok influencer. In fact, many of them already are influencers — the “getting to know you” segments often include YouTube clips of their survival feats — and as the show has gone on, awareness of the past episodes and the surrounding social media discussion has deeply shaped how more recent contestants prepare. After the first few seasons, it became common for current contestants to name-drop past stars of the show, both as models and cautionary tales. The most radically individual experience is thus profoundly socially mediated.

The show is not without its pleasures. There is amusement in seeing an arrogant contestant brought low by his failure to catch any fish day after day. There is morbid fascination in getting a window into the minds of these certified weirdos (who else would even attempt such a thing?). And there can be moments of profound empathy when a bedraggled contestant drops out, unaware that they are one of the last two remaining and that their opponent is also hanging on by a thread.

As when watching obscure sports on the Olympics, one becomes an insta-expert, confidently judging the contestants’ choices. (My go-to commentary: Hunting big game? Always a mistake, absolute hubris. Fishing, only fishing!) But having seen almost all extant episodes, I cannot accept the notion that this is a contest of skill or merit. The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong. One rule of thumb, for instance, is that the person who builds the most effective shelter will always tap out shortly thereafter. As I have said, the contestants who get their food situation permanently “locked down” (by killing a big game animal and drying all the meat) wind up with an albatross around their neck — their sole task becomes to protect their horde from the various rodents and scavengers. And in the end, no one ever has “enough” food for the long haul. Winter comes, nature closes up shop, and the show becomes a “starvation contest” — a phenomenon that has itself entered the contestants’ patter. Along the way, competitors are more likely to be eliminated by sheer happenstance — as when an otherwise highly skilled Australian competitor’s boot came unglued shortly after he landed — than by any discrete mistake.

In the end, it is an emotional game, and few of us have the emotional resources to stand up to the boredom, deprivation, and isolation of this competition. Those who do seem to be either vaguely insane or — I don’t know how else to put it — a little bit stupid. A recent winner fit the latter description, letting every disappointment and setback roll over him, only once losing his temper (upon finding that the persistent marten he had nicknamed “Sassy” had yet again stolen his food cache), mostly passing the time by reciting self-help slogans and other banalities. He was not just the last man standing, he was the Last Man.

And yet one did not begrudge him. Indeed, we were rooting for him to prevail against the last holdouts. There is a certain satisfaction in seeing the person that the system has selected for. I have no doubt he would be an exemplary middle manager, an unflappable customer service rep. But at the end of the day, we were rooting for Sassy, the true winner — who received a life-changing jackpot from this man who had been forced to generate social media content at the outer reaches of the GPS network.

There are a number of candidates for “the book that predicted Trump,” from Octavia Butler’s eerily prescient near-future dystopia that purported to “Make America Great Again” to Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind. I have occasionally quipped that Creepiness is the book that truly deserves the title. There is a moment of truth there — I do argue that the creepiness trend was in large part about the breakdown of white masculinity — but it was mostly just a joke about the almost overwhelming creepiness of Trump himself. More recently, though, it has dawned on me that another book in the series may deserve some prophetic credit, namely Why We Love Sociopaths. Or rather, it seems to have initially dawned on Aaron Bady, who tweeted about it a few times, and that prompted me to realize that Trump fits my cultural diagnosis in that book in a way that is, dare I say it, almost creepy.

My argument in Why We Love Sociopaths is that the remarkable prevelance of sociopathic characters in 2000s television was a symptom of a broken cultural contract. With the decline of the Fordist order and the rise of neoliberalism, one long-standing narrative about social mobility and merit had been discarded without being replaced by a plausible alternative. This situation gave rise to a growing sense that the only reliable means to get ahead in the system is to cheat. Certainly we can read Trump 2.0, and especially the seeming public indifference to his flagrant violation of laws and constitutional structures, as an extreme outgrowth of that basic tendency.

I organized my account around three types of sociopaths, all of which seem in retrospect to capture the Trump phenomenon in some way. The first category was the Schemer, which I mainly associated with cartoon shows where the characters are attempting to get away with mischief for its own sake. My key example was Eric Cartman from South Park, the strangely charismatic and resourceful child who periodically comes close to taking over the United States and even the world. Though Trump obviously lacks Cartman’s discipline and focus, there is something of the childish schemer in Trump — though that element is less prevalent in the embittered end-state we are now witnessing.

The second was the Climber, who stops at nothing to climb the social ladder. My key examples here was Don Draper from Mad Men. Here the connection to Trump is admittedly more distant, since my analysis was focused on meritocrats of the Obama type, who I argue should not be counted on to challenge the basic terms of the system that enabled their rise. Yet I do start out with an analysis of reality television, which I present as a “dumbed-down” version of the same basic worldview we see in prestige dramas like Mad Men and The Wire, and so I want to claim partial credit due to Trump’s association with reality TV.

The final sociopathic archetype was the Enforcer, the lawman who breaks the law in order to save it. My key example here was Jack Bauer of 24, who murders and tortures his way to stopping terrorist attacks that only see seems to have the insight to predict. Trump himself has identified unambiguously with this category, in his infamous quote (attributed to Napoleon) claiming that it is impossible to violate the law in service of your country. Clearly he is counting on his fellow citizens to decide that it doesn’t matter if he follows the legal niceties as long as he gets things done — nor is there any way to deny that the system as constituted on January 19, 2024, was basically incapable of delivering any meaningful results in a way that would be legible to the public.

Not only does Trump fit, in some way, into all of these categories, but his appeal depends on his ability to pivot among them. His status as a Cartman-esque provocateur gives people license to dismiss his scarier or more nonsensical declarations as mere bluster; his reputation as a (sort of) self-made businessman is key to his appeal; and his promise to “get things done” by any means necessary both emboldens his supporters and cows his enemies into submission. You can’t hold all three of these images together simultaneously, but they often combine in a kind of one-two punch. Cartman Trump seems most useful for such strategies. For instance, the existence of Climber Trump allows people to use the Cartman Trump to dismiss his destructive economic plans as bluster, while the frightening ambitions of Jack Bauer Trump can be rendered more palatable by reference to Cartman Trump. But on the less jovial side, it is precisely the Climber Trump that renders him plausible to many as a Jack Bauer figure who won’t be beholden to political restraints.

While in my conclusion I do offer up the feeble hope that, in a broken system, we might all benefit from being more sociopathic — a counterintuitive soundbite that was for a time picked up by Slavoj Žižek in his public lectures — my overall assessment of this trend is negative. It does offer a diagnostic of our broken system, sometimes even (in the case of The Wire in particular) a remarkably insightful one, and I admit up front that I enjoyed many of these shows (including South Park and some reality TV).

But its dominance of the entertainment field was, I believed, socially corrosive, and I think events have proven me correct. Trump 2.0 is not just politics as entertainment, which is bad enough, but it’s politics as 2000s entertainment, it’s politics as designed by people who watched way too much South Park, 24, and reality TV. I’m not making this up. Literal Republicans say as much, about themselves. Ross Douthat wrote a famous column on the rise of “South Park Republicans,” motivated primarily by a brash anti-PC attitude rather than any positive ideology. Supreme Court Justice Scalia — supposedly “the smart one” — literally cited 24 in an opinion, and the current conservative supermajority are all intellectual heirs of Scalia. As for the influence of reality TV, Trump’s trajectory speaks for itself, and clearly neither J.D. Vance nor any of Trump 2.0’s luminaries are “here to make friends.”

Obviously sociopath TV is not the only cause of Trump — nor am I saying as much. I’m saying the trend itself arose as a symptom of social breakdown, which it then helped to exacerbate. The one thing my diagnosis excludes is social media, for which I can perhaps be forgiven since I was writing in 2012 (and the book was after all about TV). But I think that many of the attitudes inculcated by South Park, reality TV, and 24 — the reflexive anti-PC “provocativeness,” the endless zero-sum competition for “clout,” and the ambient menace of violent fantasies — have shaped the social media field as well.

I’m not sure how much credit I really deserve for this prediction, since the fact of having written the book didn’t help me to predict either Trump’s success in the primaries nor his Electoral College technicality. But then, like most sane people, I had not up till that point given Donald Trump — who was little more than a vapid media phenomenon — much thought. If I had, perhaps I would have seen how well the cultural trends I diagnosed in Sociopaths converged in him. The cost, though, is that I would have squandered some of those precious remaining years and months before I was forced to spend so much of my time and energy thinking about one of the most worthless human beings ever to live. I stand behind that trade-off, even if I had no way of knowing I was making it. And if it turns out that my little book about TV trends, properly contextualized, could have prevented Trump’s rise — all I can do is apologize.

Agamben is best known for his critique of sovereign emergency powers and their tendency to reduce all legal subjects to a homo sacer-like state of absolute exposure to violence. But in more recent years, he has written more often about a seemingly opposite, but actually deeply correlative problem: the attempt to legislate every area of life. On the political level, this means collapsing legitimacy (our sense of what the law should be and do) into legality. Whatever the law is, must be legitimate, simply because it is the law — meaning that the idea of legitimacy as a critical standpoint over against the law is lost. One can see this on the level of constitutional law in the United States, where establishing the Founder’s intent, or simply repeating the way the existing institutions function, often suffices to establish the legitimacy of a particular outcome, at least in the minds of many liberals.

The same dynamic holds at an interpersonal level. On the one hand, we have increasingly lost any sense of the distinction between the legal and the ethical. I think here of the frequently given advice that after a car accident, one should not apologize, because it would mean admitting fault and could put you at a legal disadvantage. In a sane society, though, a person who believes themselves to have caused serious harm to another should apologize — and the person receiving the apology should not seize on that natural human reaction to maximize their legal advantage. On the other hand, people increasingly seem to believe that their interpersonal relationships can and indeed must be structured according to strict contractual terms. This comes up especially in sexual contexts, where one might expect legal niceties to be out of place. I look at the vogue for polyamory, for instance, and wonder at people’s apparent belief that anyone can “promise” that their feelings won’t be hurt. We could say something similar for people’s love of inscribing themselves into ever more precise identity categories that come complete with their own list of demands — or for other’s apparent belief that merely being asked to acknowledge the existence of unfamiliar gender or sexual identities is an unjust imposition to which they did not consent.

For me, the distinction between legality and legitimacy — or, more vividly, between law and justice — is pretty foundational. This is, blessedly, not because of Schmitt’s book by that title, but because it was foundational for Ted Jennings’ teaching when I was in grad school. This was when he was working on his two career-capping works on Paul, Reading Derrida / Thinking Paul and Outlaw Justice. As is well known, Paul’s mission in life was to vindicate the full inclusion of non-Jewish or Gentile believers in the Jesus movement — without requiring them to fulfill the Jewish law. And he argues for this position theologically by taking a fairly extreme position: “works of the law” cannot be necessary to save the Gentiles, because they have never actually saved anyone. What is salvific is actually faith or trust in God, apart from any external work. Although he would probably resist this description, in both books Jennings “secularizes” Paul’s argument by claiming that he is pointing to a universal dynamic in the relationship between law and justice. Law always points beyond itself, toward the principle of justice, and that principle means that law can always be called into question. When law claims to be fully self-sufficient, it betrays itself and becomes a tool of injustice.

In those days, there were many clear examples of what happens when law is separated from justice. George W. Bush was president, having taken office with a minority vote after a deeply questionable Supreme Court decision. No one had won the Electoral College without winning the popular vote in over a century, and the Supreme Court had never intervened in an election case in such an overtly partisan way. But the Electoral College was technically the law, and the Supreme Court is the last court of appeal, so he took office. After 9/11 — somewhat contrary to Agamben’s analysis — Bush did not claim sweeping emergency powers so much as fashion himself “legal tools” to wage his War on Terror. New legal categories were invented (“enemy combatant”), loopholes relating to territoriality were exploited (Guantanamo and CIA black sites), and the use of military force was authoritized even if war was not declared (in either Afghanistan or Iraq). Most chillingly, the White House set teams of lawyers to work elaborating a legal basis for the use of torture.

Basically all of this is still on the books. The Authorization to Use Military Force against al Qaeda and its allies is still the law of the land. Obama took advantage of Bush-era laws and norms to run a drone strike program that even claimed the right to execute American citizens without due process. Bush’s torture memos, even if never used by later administrations, were never tested in court, and certainly none of the architects of the torture regime were ever prosecuted. And the normalization of the Electoral College technicality gave us Trump in 2016 — and almost provided him with a perfectly legal means to seize a second term against the popular will in 2020.

Meanwhile, Republicans have been weaponizing laws and rules in many other ways. The anti-abortion movement has routinely passed state laws that were known to be unconstitutional, for the express purpose of giving them a route to the Supreme Court in the hopes of chipping away at and eventually overturning Roe v. Wade. In Congress, they have exploited every rule and loophole — from the abuse of the fillibuster to McConnell’s refusal to even consider Obama’s last Supreme Court nominee. Less discussed have been their efforts to ratchet the balance of power in the House permanently to the right. By means of the Hastert Rule (named after a convicted child molestor, by the way), which mandates that no legislation can come to the floor unless it has a support of the majority of Republicans, laws that would have enjoyed majority support have been obstructed even more efficiently than with the Senate fillibuster.

Meanwhile, professing the sanctity of laws and norms, Democrats refuse to change the rules to take away Republicans’ illegitimate advantage — because they have no conceptual basis for calling it illegitimate. The rules are the rules, and changing them would be cheating. That goes even for a stolen Supreme Court, whose Democratic members insist must be respected even as it undoes all their priorities with a gleeful disdain for precedent or even normal legal procedure — many of the biggest recent decisions should have been dismissed because the plaintiff lacked standing. But again, the rules are the rules, and all Democrats can do is grin and bear it.

We may be seeming to enter a new phase with the total brazen lawlessness of Trump 2.0. But I think it is, instead, the natural next step in the dialectic. Law shorn of legitimacy is already a kind of force, an inert brute fact — and so it should not surprise us that it eventually gives way to overt force. When law that has become nothing but a tissue of arbitrary technicalities, is it surprising that someone would eventually treat the concept of law itself as one huge annoying technicality? Meanwhile it is hard to imagine popular passions being inflamed by the call to vindicate the claims of Congress, which has systematically rendered itself incapable of passing routine legislation with majority support, or of the Courts, which have increasingly revealed themselves to be the servants of presidential power in any case. Nor is it any wonder that low-information normies approve of Trump’s actions, because the dysfunction of the system has created pent-up demand for someone to finally do something — without all the infighting and excuses.

The fact that what is being done is purely destructive, that we are losing things we may never get back, has not yet become clear. And when it does, we will need leaders who can speak to the level of justice and legitimacy rather than law and norm and procedure — leaders who can say, straightforwardly, that Trump shouldn’t do what he’s doing because it’s pointlessly cruel and that Trump doesn’t have a mandate to do what he’s doing because he’s a liar. When that moment comes, though, I fear that we will instead get the same mealy-mouthed losers who could do nothing but mumble about a “democracy” that means you can only vote for one party for the rest of your life and you should never actually expect to get anything out of it. We should want a return to law, a return to procedures and norms recognized by all political actors — but only on just and legitimate terms. Perhaps that can occur within the boundaries of the existing constitution, but a return to the status quo ante of 2024 is not and cannot be the answer. Until people of good will come to understand this, there will never be hope.

As I have been writing my posts on the relationship between Trump and neoliberalism, a feeling of futility has sometimes set in. Who cares about this abstract question amid all the wreckage he has already created? My first response to such a demand for practicality is to insist that it is always better to understand than not to understand. To the extent that my analysis is accurate, it’s important because it’s true. And that truth may lead to a strategic gain, insofar as viewing Trump as a big dumb continuation of neoliberalism might reduce the leftist temptation to think “maybe we can use this” or, worse, “maybe he has a point.”

On a personal level, though, part of the reason I am focusing on such large-scale questions is simply that I have done a poor job as a day-to-day commentator or prognosticator. I wrote shortly after the election that it seemed fanciful that Trump would attempt to cancel future elections. Now it turns out that his opening gambits were to attempt to invalidate the Fourteenth Amendment and the separation of powers, which makes extreme outcomes like that much more imaginable. At the same time, however, the Democratic refrain that democracy is in peril seems to remain unconvincing to the general population. Trump’s approval ratings are favorable, seemingly precisely because of the actions he is taking. He won the election, he seems to be taking bold action to fulfill his promises, and most people like it — where’s the threat to democracy?

The problem, as ever, is the lack of clarity about what democracy is and why it’s valuable. And part of the confusion comes from the tendency to conflate “democracy” with “the US Constitutional system,” which was avowedly set up in order to tame and even frustrate democratic ambitions to the extent possible. To the extent that Democrats are simply calling for a return to the conventional constitutional order, I would certainly prefer that to the current situation. But that order is sclerotic and unsustainable. Indeed, many of the kinds of actions that Trump is doing now are ones that I would have liked to see Obama or Biden do — strong-arming the Senate instead of deferring to their stupid anti-democratic customs, or simply ignoring things like the debt ceiling. I’m even on record as saying that Obama should have refused to acknowledge Trump’s Electoral College technicality and begun the transition with Hillary.

What’s frustrating about this situation is that this final presidential push was bound to happen. The current system does not fulfill popular demands, by design, and there’s no reason to expect a society to tolerate that indefinitely. And unfortunately, the presidency is the only institution other than Congress with anything like a democratic mandate, and it is definitely the only institution that can directly do stuff. The shame is that it didn’t happen under a president who wanted to do good, instead of a president who wants to do nothing but harm. And that stems in part from our old friend neoliberalism, whose “best practices” do not include bold state initiatives. But it also stems from the older generation of Democrats’ pathetic Boomer reverence for the Constitution that never evolved past childish Cold War truisms. And now that it’s tumbling down, we’re all being asked to hope that the system that frustrated popular demands for a generation and gave us Trump will somehow stop Trump.

There is nonetheless a deep irony here, because Trump’s rampage against the constitutional order is obviously undercutting the sources of presidential power and even of state legitimacy. One reason that the executive branch is able to do stuff is that it knows stuff — indeed, it provides the standard statistics that underwrite all other public and private economic activity and much else besides. By destroying that basic state capacity, Trump is destroying any reason for citizens to trust the government about anything, unless they happen to trust the current holder of the presidency. It becomes pretty difficult to run a society — even a paranoid police state determined to carry out the biggest forced population transfer in human history — without that baseline of trust. It also becomes pretty difficult to know whether you’ve succeeded in achieving your goals and to convince others that you have.

Low-information voters are still only seeing the broadest themes in Trump’s actions. He said he’d cut foreign aid, which most voters falsely believe to take up a huge portion of the budget, and he’s doing so. He said he’d appoint Musk to head up an effort to aggressively cut waste in the federal government, and he’s doing so. He said he’d use tariffs to strong-arm other countries, and he’s doing so. The self-undermining and nonsensical nature of many of those actions, much less their long-term consequences for the constitutional order, are seemingly not on people’s radar. But if he continues to “succeed,” many people will be rudely awakened to the fact that the government seemingly has no ability to benefit them in any way — and whether that realization hits while Trump is president or after he dies peacefully in his sleep surrounded by his friends and family, it will be a major, probably fatal blow to the legitimacy of the system.

It might even be the kind of things where particular states or regions start asking why the federal government even exists, and then the great “national divorce” so desired by conservatives might actually happen. And then we might all recall, too late, that “national divorce” is a euphemism for civil war — which, as everybody knows, is the very worst thing that can happen to a society. So now I’ve maxed out the negativity of my predictions about Trump and no longer have to worry about being made to look naive by the actual course of events.

In my last post, I awkwardly name-dropped a book to admit I hadn’t read it — namely Robert McDonald’s Works Like a Charm: Incentive Rhetoric and the Economization of Everyday Life, available wherever fine books are sold. Since then I have in fact read it and want to discuss some connections with my notion of a Trumpian “shove” as the successor to the neoliberal “nudge.” What follows is not a full account of the book — which, along with being a great critique of “nudge” rhetoric, also turns out to be an accessible primer on Lacan (with depressingly relevant examples) — but a sampling of some key concepts that I find especially applicable to Trump’s heretical neoliberalism.

McDonald’s Lacanian approach allows him to see some internal dynamics of the nudge that otherwise would not be as evident. (I will spare you the Lacan and give you the pay-off.) First, he notes that nudges never live up to their promise of seamless unconscious manipulation of behavior. Instead, they always announce themselves more or less clearly, spurring the subject to begin questioning what the nudger wants from them — and possibly rebelling against the intended outcome simply out of annoyance at the attempted manipulation. For this reason, nudges generally don’t work, and presumably the nudgers know they don’t work. Hence McDonald concludes that nudges are not actually directed at the ostensible nudgees, but are messages sent to some presumed third party. For example, the attempts to “incentivize” a return to work post-covid by removing unemployment benefits had not apparent impact on employment — but they were a powerful message that everyone should get back to work and no longer expect any mollycoddling (my term, not McDonald’s). Finally, the nudge paradigm as a whole sends a broader message of despair, signalling clearly that any deliberate collective project is impossible. This opens up a performative contradiction, because on the one hand, only the market can be trusted to deliver any social benefit, but on the other hand, the market is apparently not achieving that on its own and needs tinkering by expert state actors.

Applying these to Trump’s “shoves” — his attempts to use economic inducements to blackmail people into his desired behavior — I think we get further evidence that Trump is a heretical mutation of the neoliberal project. First of all, like a classic nudge, Trump’s “shoves” generate a lot of questions as to what he really wants, but in contrast to the neoliberal apparatchik, Trump’s desire is fundamentally unknowable — apparently even to himself. Hence investors and political commentators all assumed, up to the weekend before they were set to take effect, that Trump would call off his harsh tariffs against Canada and Mexico. And at the last minute he did, at least temporarily, after securing concessions that most observers agree were already happening (and, bizarrely, conceding to Claudia Sheinbaum’s demand that he take more action to stop the flow of guns into Mexico). Will he find another excuse to kick the can down the road in early March? Presumably, but who knows?

What is at stake here is more than simple incoherence or inconsistency — and we are certainly not dealing with some game of 11-dimensional chess where Trump is skillfully deploying Nixon’s “madman strategy.” Where the nudger ostensibly sought to influence the behavior of the nudgee for the sake of some particular end, Trump’s shoves seem to be nothing but the assertion of dominance and control for its own sake. And we can see that the same ambition was present in the original nudge paradigm, which promised a form of seamless social control without political conflict. Surely what made nudging so appealing to people like Barack Obama was not the series of piecemeal social gains they could deliver (increasing uptake of 401(k)’s by 6%!) but the very idea that “smart” policymakers could gently guide society from behind the scenes without indulging in anything so vulgar as political contestation.

In practice, many subjects were offended by the implied blackmail of the nudge — and in protest, they have helped to elect someone who took away the implication but kept the blackmail. But, importantly, they are no longer the people being nudged. Rather, the deep state wreckers and DEI elites and, above all, foreigners are finally getting a taste of their own medicine. This is why Trump and company have targetted arguably the most sympathetic and beneficial use of government money (USAID) for absolute elimination and why they began their tariff crusade by threatening to blow up relations with our closest neighbors — to send the message that they will be swayed by no moral claim, especially not a claim of loyalty. All that matters is the brute fact of economic competition, which Trump is attempting to rig so that America wins every time (instead of merely most of the time). Any other concern or priority is not merely a distraction from the important task of “winning” every economic statistic, but an active deception and a ploy.

And that brings us to the performative contradiction of Trump’s agenda. If the classic nudgers were testifying to the failure of the state to organize collective life, Trumpian shoves presuppose the failure of the economy itself — and on a global scale. In his very desperation to gain the approval embedded in the economic statistics he has chosen to target (coming out “ahead” in all trade balances), Trump implicitly invalidates all previous economic outcomes as illegitimate, tainted as they are by wokeness and meddling foreigners. And his attempt to assert American domination presupposes that America has been almost comically weak for basically the entire postwar era, allowing even Canadians to manipulate them into unfavorable trade deals.

This disconnection from reality is what makes Trump so scary, but it is also what makes him weak. Indeed, on his own terms, Trump cannot possibly succeed, because he has deprived himself of any standard of judgment other than his own irritable whim — which will never be satisfied and which, ironically, makes him extremely vulnerable to people who manipulate him by setting up incentives and fooling him into thinking their preferred outcome is his own choice.

Though I haven’t written much on neoliberalism lately, I still dip into the literature now and again. The next book in my queue, Robert McDonald’s Works Like a Charm: Incentive Rhetoric and the Economization of Everyday Life, has put me in mind of the classic neoliberal notion of the “nudge” and how it might help us think through the vexed question of Trump’s relation to neoliberalism. (This post does not directly reflect McDonald’s specific view, though, because I am not planning to start it until my train ride tomorrow — but in the true spirit of blogging, I decided to write at the moment I had the time, the idea, and the motivation rather than waiting.)

In the “Trump chapter” of Neoliberalism’s Demons, I claim that Trump is a heretical neoliberal in the proper theological sense — someone who radicalizes the premises of neoliberalism in order to purify it. Trump doubtless violates many specific neoliberal policy preferences (e.g., free trade, trust in abstract expertise and competence), but when it comes to what I identify as the moral core of neoliberalism, he is a true believer. He really sees the world as a field of zero-sum competitions whose results don’t just sort people into winners and losers, but do so in a way that reveals their true worthiness as people. His critique of actual-existing neoliberalism is that the “wrong” people and countries are winning.

Hence Trump concludes that the system must be rigged against the “right” people and countries and sets about righting that supposed wrong to make sure that the “right” people and countries start winning again. Obviously his framework for determining the “right” people and countries is deeply racist and xenophobic, but I think it’s important to highlight that he’s taking a specifically neoliberal approach to racism and xenophobia — the damage that the racial and foreign Others are doing is economic and calls for a shift in economic policy. The economy is still in principle the site for legitimation of individuals and groups, but in his view it hasn’t been allowed to operate properly. Once he “fixes” it, white people will once again be in charge of everything (instead of merely most things) and America will once again dominate the world (instead of being merely the unipolar hegemon).

Trump is pursuing this agenda even more radically in his second term. What’s striking to me, however, is how thoroughly neoliberal his tools are. So far, everything is structured as a big, dumb “nudge.” To start with the least heretical policy: he doesn’t like the trade balance with other countries, and so he threatens them economically with tariffs. Traditional neoliberals would prefer that tariffs be kept at a minimum, but there is room for protective or punitive tariffs if they aren’t following the rules of the free market, as Trump believes other countries are not. More radical, though, is his attempt to weaponize economic tools to achieve seemingly unrelated policy goals, like using tariffs in his negotiations with Colombia over deportations (apparently unsuccessfully, or at least not as successfully as Trump believes) or his threats to impose punitive tariffs on Denmark if they do not cede Greenland to him. And on the domestic side, he doesn’t like anything “woke” or DEI, so he tries to take away all their money — most dramatically through the attempted freeze on federal grants and loans, but also with the more routine threats to withold federal funding from sanctuary cities, school districts that acknowledge trans people exist, and other supposed malefactors.

In both cases, Trump also holds in reserve the punitive arm of the state — refusing to rule out a military conquest of Greenland (surely a mighty feat that will live on in song and legend) or the deployment of troops in his deportation scheme. That, too, broadly fits with the neoliberal paradigm, which tends to delegitimate any direct role for the state other than the police and military. But it is fascinating that these hamfisted economic “nudges” are what he reaches for first and most often. From the classic neoliberal perspective, the actions are much too “in your face” and forceful, rather than the seamless, almost unconscious manipulation that “nudges” were supposed to achieve. Hence we could call them “shoves” rather than “nudges.” But both are still economic in nature, and thus in continuity with a worldview in which economic incentives are the only legible motivations.

More than that, Trump conceives of the policy priorities that are not directly economic from a common sense perspective as profoundly economic. They are part of his agenda to “fix” the economic order so it starts delivering the “correct” results again. And once we see that, even some of his crazier policy preferences start to make a perverse kind of sense. The best example here is his fantasy that tariffs can somehow replace the income tax as the primary funding source for the federal government. This goal is for all intents and purposes impossible to achieve and the pursuit of it would cause untold suffering and disruption. But what makes him think it must be possible is that it is morally necessary — it would be a form of reparations from the whole world, for all the economic damage they have done to America with the many unfair deals they have imposed upon us. The same logic worked on a smaller scale with the fantasy that Mexico would pay for the wall. By supposedly “sending” so many immigrants to steal American jobs, Mexico had done profound economic harm to America, so it’s only fair that they should foot the bill for the solution.

Trump’s mutation of neoliberalism is of course delusional and simplistic — but it is, in its own way, deeply coherent. In fact, it is too coherent, which leaves it with no room to process the unexpected or even the unknown. The fact that all the people who actually know anything objectively true at all are in on the anti-American DEI conspiracy is obviously a huge weakness, and it leaves those of us on the outside of the Trump bubble with very little leverage to persuade them to change course. Yet I cannot help but notice that the reciprocal shove of everyone in the country simultaneously shouting at them that, no, they can’t arbitrarily shut down the entire federal government because some of duly legislated programs might be too “woke” did prove effective. We can also expect reality itself to shove them back if they really do attempt to replace the income tax with tariffs, because they will very quickly realize that they don’t have any money to pay all the guys with the guns.

This is obviously very far from the ideal of deliberative democracy, but it makes sense that a neoliberal heretic would not be invested in an ideal to which the orthodox believers gave half-hearted lip service at best.

Kamala Harris’s closing pitch to the American people was to highlight the threat to democracy represented by Donald Trump. I share that sense of threat — lying about a stolen election and fomenting an insurrection to disrupt its certification are certainly not the marks of someone with a deep and abiding respect for democratic norms. And yet I also understand why that pitch has fallen flat, even among people who acknowledge the 2020 election result and disapprove of the January 6 attacks. After explaining why I find the mainstream liberal rhetoric on this position so unconvincing, I will discuss the more profound sense in which Trump and his movement represent a threat to the possibility of a more meaningful democratic culture emerging in the US, then conclude with some practical tips you can try at home.

1. A Critique of the “Threat to Democracy” Rhetoric

On the one hand, America has always had a tenuous grasp on democratic norms. Disputes over voting procedure and eligibility have always been part of the normal range of political contestation; gerrymandering has been “a thing” since the founding of the Republic; state and local elections are routinely scheduled strategically to decrease turnout and thus accountability; money plays such a huge role in election races that people seem to regard donation as almost more important than voting itself; the Senate is insanely malapportioned and has adopted even more anti-democratic rules on top of that; the two-party system artificially narrows the range of political options in a self-reinforcing way; the separate election of two houses of Congress and the Presidency all but guarantees divided government and thus gridlock most of the time, preventing the implementation of any coherent political program; and of course the Electoral College has allowed the loser to win twice in our young century, to the point where the popular vote has basically disappeared from public discourse. There simply is not a robust culture of democracy in the US. No rational American adult expects their vote to lead directly to any specified outcome. We vote mainly to try to prevent the worst, but there is no sense in which the people at large have a hand in setting the political agenda.

Within that context, the Democrats have done virtually nothing to create the conditions for more authentic democracy. No voting rights legislation was passed or even seriously taken up under Biden — in part because Senate Democrats can’t (or simply don’t want to) discipline their own party even on the purely procedural question of the fillibuster rule. Al Gore conceded to his virtually unprecedented 2000 Electoral College upset almost immediately and Democrats since have done nothing to call into question the institution that has effectively stolen two elections from them, both with disastrous consequences. Indeed, they seem to be “leaning in,” running narrowly focused campaigns on swing states while making no effort in Republican-leaning states. Nor was there any attempt to counteract the extremely unpopular Dobbs decision — in part because they concede in advance that the Supreme Court would simply strike it down again.

And simply at the level of rhetoric, it cannot be the case that the only way to defend authentic democracy is to vote for one and only one party forever and ever amen. It cannot be the case that voters are not allowed to register their dissatisfaction with the omnishambles of the Biden administration because the only other option the system allows is illegitimate and unacceptable — a claim that the Democrats don’t seem to even believe themselves, since Kamala Harris called to “congratulate” Trump on his victory, just as Obama cheerfully agreed to meet with him before handing over the keys and Hillary attended his inauguration.

Certainly Trump is going to be more supportive of restricting voting rights than the typical Republican, and he is going to empower and embolden others on the state level to take more repressive actions. Republicans will likely further lock down their veto points and exploit all avaliable leverage to thwart the popular will — above all on the question of abortion. He may even concoct a rationale to run for a third term and find his hand-picked Supreme Court willing to legitimize it. But the notion that he is somehow going to abolish elections or appoint himself dictator for life strains credulity. And again, if Democrats really believe that, then they should be willing to take much more radical action to prevent him from taking power than re-running Hillary’s campaign with a slightly more charismatic and likeable candidate. Either the Democrats don’t really believe Trump is a burgeoning dictator or they are cowards and fools of almost unimaginable dimensions. (Or both!)

2. A Broader Concept of Democracy Than “People Periodically Vote”

There is more to democracy than just voting. First, the people who propose to rule themselves must have some sense of shared identity, embodied in shared practices and institutions. Second, the community must be able to hold itself and its representatives accountable with reference to some kind of reality principle — some shared empirical basis for judging the success or failure of policies and projects. In the narrow sense of “people voting,” Tuesday’s absolutely disastrous and devastating election result was undeniably democratic. Yet the other two conditions are obviously lacking.

In terms of the first condition, Trump and the Republicans have set themselves up as the sole arbiters of who really “counts” as American, and they have inculcated an attitude of paranoia and distrust in their supporters through false accusations of voter fraud. More broadly, they clearly have no investment in American political institutions except insofar as they can be weaponized to give them more power, nor do they value public goods such as public schools, public libraries, public health regulations, etc., etc. And this connects up with the second condition. For example, the result of the 2020 presidential election is an undeniable, brute empirical fact — yet a strong pluarlity of our fellow citizens believe the obviously self-serving lies of a life-long scam artist over the unanimous testimony of election officials and judges from all 50 states and both parties. And that is only the most extreme instance of an attitude that rejects factual claims from experts precisely because they are made by experts.

What unites both of these two anti-democratic tendencies is their rejection of the public in favor of the private. And to that extent, Trumpian populism is a radicalization of the neoliberal ethos. In the classical era of neoliberalism, from roughly 1991 to 2016, the general consensus was that the purpose of public institutions was to set the rules of the game of market competition and to provide a range of public goods — such as basic research, official statistics, and the conditions for turning young human beings into productive human capital — that market actors had no incentive to reliably provide. Already, the value of public goods and public knowledge was implicitly called into question. They were not ends in themselves, but means to economic growth. Indeed, they were often even viewed as necessary evils, and as many such public duties were entrusted to private profit-seeking entities as possible.

In our new populist moment, by contrast, even this notion of the public as the necessary handmaiden of private accumulation has been delegitimized. Public schools don’t exist to induct students into a shared secular democratic culture, for instance, but are treated as hired hands to provide parents with babysitting services and to inculcate only those values the parents favor. Public libraries are not treated as repositories of certified knowledge, but as reflections of whatever arbitrary values or beliefs the surrounding community happens to have. And public office is increasingly treated as a private possession — above all by Trump, who jokes that he should get a “do-over” because he faced too much opposition and scrutiny to fully enjoy his first term and who muses that perhaps he should not have agreed to leave office in January 2021 after all.

This preference for private power over against public goods goes hand-in-hand with the racism, sexism, xenophobia, and other oppressive views characteristic of the radical right. The unfettered exercise of private power will inevitably mean the reassertion of traditional forms of dominance in private life — the superiority of the man over his wife, the ownership of children by their parents, the various hierarchies of race, etc., etc. In reality, the neoliberal order was fully compatible with such hierarchies, which festered and worsened even as exceptional individuals from disadvantaged groups enjoyed spectacular success. But even that token representation was experienced as a humiliation by many of our fellow citizens — above all Trump himself, who first stormed onto the political scene to spread lies meant to delegitimize our first Black president and who arguably chose to run for president specifically because Obama mocked him in his remarks at the Presidential Correspondents’ Dinner.

Reaganite deregulation was ostensibly meant to unleash wealth creation. Trumpian deconstruction of the administrative state is meant to make sure that there’s no one who can tell the boss what to do — no one to give workers or customers or anyone else any leverage against the hierarchy of private domination. Something similar is going on with the destruction of any public consensus on a shared reality through algorithmic manipulation. Where before one might decry wasting money on “useless knowledge,” now the goal is to make sure no genuine learning or understanding occurs at all — by feeding everyone a customized stream of bullshit that targets their own personal weaknesses and insecurities, a tendency that LLM-generated text and images will surely only amplify.

On both these points, the Democrats are again poor messengers, because they don’t genuinely believe in public goods or the disinterested pursuit of knowledge. They remain neoliberal through and through, meaning that they can’t get past arguing that quality public schools actually help economic growth or that we need to learn stuff because it’s a knowledge economy — or whatever the fashionable corporate bullshit happens to be today. “Greening the economy will create jobs and help us compete against China!” Seriously: shut the fuck up.

3. It’s the Capitalism, Stupid!

We can fight these tendencies and create more livable conditions. People have done so in the past, to varying degrees of success. But all of these tendencies are intrinsic to capitalism. We may well be entering a new phase that will make us nostalgic for neoliberalism — a phase centered more on establishing economic autarky and zero-sum competitions between nations — but it’s still going to be capitalism, which means that it’s still going to be exploitative, racist, endlessly hungry from free reproductive labor, etc., etc. We can’t solve those problems in the long run with solutions that are fundamentally parasitical on capitalist production, such as the welfare state or universal basic income, even if they are financed through the vulgar online MMT magical thinking of “helicopter money.”

We need to figure out ways of organizing our communities and our values and our livelihoods in non-capitalist ways. That has been more or less off the table for a generation, in large part because the biggest large-scale experiment with doing that spectacularly collapsed and everyone decided that the system jerry-rigged between two world wars in a peasant society was the only possible way you could do anything other than capitalism. We need to stop letting our rejection of a society that is dead and gone (and that ever fewer people still alive even directly experienced) limit our imagination.

And we need to get the fuck off of social media as soon as possible. I know I am late to this game, having held out at Twitter way too long and then tried to make Bluesky work. The beginning of the end for me was a huge blow-up around a Financial Times column that averred that Bluesky was a liberal bubble, prompting much indignation. After I gave up actively contributing, I have occasionally taken a peek in there and — good grief, it is absolutely absurd. It’s like the liberal version of when we used to make fun of Fox News for suddenly lurching to Hillary Clinton’s ancient scandals while Trump’s trials were going on. The immense levels of cope, verging on the conspiratorial (one pollster in Iowa has figured out it’s going to be a Harris landslide), made me feel like I was on another planet.

We all need to read more — really read. We can’t keep getting our news in two-sentence bursts or trying to have serious discussions with decontextualized fragments. We need to keep some kind of intellectual culture alive, because public schools are dying and universities no longer care about such matters. We need to keep ahold of reality. Like Matthew Ellis — whose excellent post today I have had in the back of my mind as I wrote this — I would encourage you to read the financial press. I subscribe to the Financial Times currently, and find it refreshingly factual (complete with non-tendentious headlines, for my Bluesky bros!). I’ve subscribed to Bloomsburg Businessweek in the past and found it excellent. You would be unimaginably better informed if you just read one of those regularly and subscribed to the New Left Review than you will ever be from scrolling on social media.

We are in a really bad situation. I don’t know how to make it better, but I do know we need to stop making ourselves actively stupider.