A Different Project for 2025: Finding an Off-Ramp from Trumpism
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
Buckminster Fuller
“You have to see it to be it.”
Billie Jean King
Today is Martin Luther King Jr Day, and by a cruel twist of fate, Inauguration Day for Donald Trump. As we lurch into this new year and new era, partisans on both sides of our American Polarization Industrial Complex, which is now our chief export to the rest of the world, are either licking their chops at the prospect of Donnyworld 2.0, or licking their wounds over another electoral battering, one that seems to have struck the death knell of the diversity-centric Democratic party project.
In the last post, we looked at the fool’s gold of urging the Dems to rebuild bridges to the ‘working classes,’ in order to re-inflate their brand and street credibility with the CMA-MMA-lunchpail crowd. I won’t rehash that argument here, but another way of looking at the situation is that the Trumpists have now completely embraced the idea of utopian social engineering, while the Dems are still trying to defend and shore up enthusiasm for the economic status quo. Expanding opportunity inside the same overall structure, which is what Democrats are pushing, was rejected by millions of voters as pro-establishment, and worthy of the dustbin. Trump, by contrast, has been able to conjure up an imaginary homeland for his supporters, where women, blacks, and other subpar humans know their place again, where white people start churning out babies above replacement level again, and where all the liberal hoaxes and schemes are exposed and eradicated, leaving Americans free to gas-guzzle, joke off-color, take long, powerful showers, and to comfortably support a big family on a high-school education (an education, by the way, that doesn’t include feel-bad subjects like indigenous American genocide, African American slavery, and the various social justice movements that distract us from the City on a Hill mythology). Think of a society that looks like a giant Cracker Barrel, where hard-working people go on their lunch breaks, wearing Carhartts and work boots, and then again on Sunday, after church, with ironed flannels and floral print dresses. Everything worth buying is in the adjoining gift-shop, or next door at Tractor Supply. The Trumpian utopia is free from the disturbing winds of social change, the creative destruction of global capitalism, and mounting evidence of ecological collapse.
As we have covered in this blog repeatedly, Trumpism has some built-in advantages over any form of liberalism that tries to defend the establishment. Its cosmic dourness more closely matches the on-the-ground realities of economic and environmental collapse. Its sharp demonization of “the enemy within” means that not only does Trumpism not have to bear the burden of building a better life for everyone, it also has a ready-made excuse when its polices foal to deliver the promised goods: it’s the other guys’ fault. Living in a comfortable partisan silo, where everything outside is a threat, makes fundraising, messaging, and mobilization efficient and effective, with every crazy lib anecdote mined for maximum outrage.
Of course, these very strengths of Trumpism will be its downfall. Out-group demonization is a great way to build in-group solidarity and loyalty, but it cannot, by definition, build a better world for everyone, either inside the country or internationally. Everything is zero-sum. For me to win, everyone else must lose. So expect to see a lot of losers over the next year or so: transgender folks, documented and undocumented immigrants, women who want to actually make their own health and reproductive decisions, Palestinians, Ukrainians, systemically-disadvantaged people with no more DEI leg-ups, poor people in general, consumers footing the bill for tariffs and mass deportations, and the planet in general.
With the surprising ascent of Elon Musk, many of the economic populist trappings of Trumpism are already starting to fray and flap in the wind. Millions of ‘pragmatist’ Trump voters, who were counting on the elite being put in their place, with economic advantages being returned to regular people, are now seeing that billionaires think that most of us earth-dwellers are just parasitic and lazy, in need of serious haircuts (the anodyne term for making people’s actual lives much worse). In short, many Trumpists voted for downward shifts in wealth and income distribution, and they’re finding out that it’s actually going to go the other direction.
For liberals, the spectacle and audacity of Trump’s new term will be virtually irresistible. After all, he is the greatest oxygen-eater in the world, the absolute king of drawing eyeballs, whether misty-eyed with awe or vessel-bursting with rage. The mainstream media, with shrinking audiences and budgets, will mine the chaos for easy money, and liberal comedians are bitterly overjoyed at having silver-platter fodder served up for another few years.
And the ultimate temptation for Democrats and liberal activists will be to fully embrace their role as Trump opponents, gatekeepers of the rational and commonsensical. But like the chimera of appealing to the working class, the lure of being a Trump-stopper is a dead-end. It is playing right into Trump’s hands, letting him call the shots and delineate the field of play. And what’s the best that can be hoped for, in this adversarial role? That Trump’s policies will royally fuck things up, flipping the House in 2026 and the presidency in 2028? Even if those swing happen, they will likely just be the usual pendulum action, which will reach its peak and then swing back the other way in subsequent cycles. But most importantly, we don’t have the luxury of time. Instead of being content in occupying one side of a polarized political and cultural landscape, fighting to swing the fulcrum of popular fickleness back in your direction for a little while, liberals need to start pushing their own vision of social engineering, one that operates through actual models of the future, concrete embodiments of a world that must come to pass for our species to have a chance at survival. In short, change the game, and make the old way of seeing things obsolete, as Buckminster Fuller urges in the opening quote to this piece.
As the liberal postmortems and analyses of the 2024 election continue to spin out, one theme I keep hearing is, “We have to be ready to think differently, to listen to people and bring new ideas to the table.” OK, that’s a good start. But if bringing new ideas to the table just means pushing to uncover that creamy center of commonsense consensus, compromising with Trumpists on immigration, abortion, and other so-called ‘conservative’ causes, then we’ve failed before we have begun. Trump didn’t rise to power, twice, by reaching out to his political opponents to find common ground and to foster genteel cooperation. No, Trumpism is scorched-earth, take-no-prisoners warfare, a quasi-religious crusade to rid the world of liberal evildoers and to institute a grievance-driven restoration of conditions that have all gone past their expiration dates.
Entering into this octagon of fever-fantasy to fight Trumpism is not a recipe for success. Instead, liberals need to quickly build working models of what a sustainable future civilization could, and indeed must, look like. As I envision it, these models will not come via a particular political party, but will be sourced and funded from nonpartisan sponsors/donors. As readers of this blog know, the three big policy planks that these models should embody are: Universal Basic Income, Bigger Home Bases, and Modern Money Theory.
Next time, we’ll begin a series of recapitulation pieces, restating and revising these main ideas, in the light of the new Trump 2.0 landscape. If, as I suspect, Trump’s actions start to tank the economic conditions of regular people pretty quickly, the tide of popular opinion could turn rapidly, and people will start looking around for another radical solution to our polycrisis. If nothing else, Trumpism has whetted people’s appetite for drastic and unconventional change. It’s high time for liberals to take advantage of this growing sentiment, and to craft our own moonshot for the future.
Next time: Universal Basic Income — why we should give everyone money.
Originally published at http://entropolitanblog.com on January 20, 2025.
