The hyperactivity of the second Trump administration continues apace; like a bureaucratic catherine wheel, it spins and spins, spitting out executive orders in place of sparks. Some of the most absurd proposals of his campaign are seeing the light of day. He has issued a freeze of all federal aid flowing to various agencies throughout the country (a judge has temporarily blocked it). He vowed to fire FBI agents involved in 6 January investigations and in all the criminal cases against him, and he declared his intention to make their names public, which would put their lives and their families’ lives in danger (a judge has temporarily blocked revealing their names).
He gave Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, a free hand to gut the federal agencies charged with organising and guarding American prosperity and wellbeing. This included allowing Musk and his partly teenaged crew access to Americans’ social security records. (A judge has temporarily blocked Musk’s access to all US Treasury payment information.) Trump declared his intention to disband the United States Agency for International Development (USAid), an agency that, among other activities, provides food and medical care to tens of millions of impoverished people around the world. In a moment so appalling it seemed surreal, he announced that he planned to forcibly relocate the almost two million Palestinians who live in Gaza. He refers to the Palestinian homeland as an American “real estate development for the future”. His Middle East envoy is, beyond surrealism and satire, a Jewish property developer.
The liberal response? Nothing much. Having cried wolf for eight years – through a series of persecutions and prosecutions that were, mostly, petty, grandstanding tantrums – the liberal establishment seems to have exhausted its energy and vocabulary. Those judges are the only hurdles the Trump-Musk assault has faced; political critique as such has dissolved. The left has either rolled over for Trump, or it has contented itself with extended chin-stroking and furrowing of the brow. Sometimes it even tries to give yesterday’s “fascist” the benefit of the doubt, for example by suddenly discovering that the USAid plays politics and sometimes misspends and misdirects its funding – transparently inherent vices of such projects but hardly shocking or irremediable. A New York Times article even suggested that Trump’s threat to cleanse Palestine of the Palestinians might well have the beneficial effect of changing the “tired diplomatic paradigm” in the Middle East. It would certainly change the paradigm.
All the paralysis, the complacency, and the opportunism were almost predictable. The liberal establishment had always protested too much. Made giddy by the moral carte blanche their caricature of an evil Trump had conferred on them, they indulged their own authoritarian instincts and used shaming and retribution to enforce correct racial, sexual, gender and climate-related attitudes in American society. The cycle of revenge that returned Trump to the White House is downright Jacobean. It will not end any time soon.
The Democratic establishment has been emasculated by a 78-year-old strongman. The lack of opposition is hardly surprising. Taking decisive counter-action is not what political establishments do in our time of discredited elites. Political opposition will have to come from civil society, as it did during the class struggles in the 1930s, the battle for civil rights in the 1960s, and the protests against the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s. But there are profound differences between those times and now. First, there is no clear issue for people to rally around. Trump’s constitution-busting executive orders have no consistent pattern, except the still highly theoretical aim of abolishing government itself, and every executive order has distractedly raised a different concern.
There is no war, and there is no class struggle. Few Americans identify with a social or economic class, and no American associates their inability to afford precious goods with their membership in one. Race has lost its combustion. The Super Bowl half-time show, always a symbolic American moment, had Kendrick Lamar, thriving in the ranks of Universal Music Group, a white-owned multinational corporation, performing a song that insulted another black rapper, also flourishing in the embrace of the same corporation. Even as Samuel L Jackson, costumed as Uncle Sam, declared in a time warp that Lamar’s “ghetto” music outraged white society. But white society was there, in the person of Trump himself, white society’s tribune, enjoying the whole spectacle, until his team, the Chiefs, let the game slip away, when he abruptly left. (There is no room for losers in America’s new Gilded Age, even if they are last year’s champions.)
More fundamentally, the country is prosperous, peaceful and pampered. Curiously, the so-called vibe shift to the right, in the US and abroad, is not the result of a severe material crisis, as it was in the 1920s and 1930s. On the contrary, the right-populist turn seems to be the effect of improved material, and especially technological, conditions that, for better and for worse, have made people furious with limits on their desires. If America appears to be leading the way, that is simply because America has always been a pioneer in the Western evolution of individual rights into a new type of fragile, enraged solipsism.
The opposition to Trump needs a single issue, and a single, young, charismatic figure. (Timothée Chalamet’s Dylan won’t do. Neither will a constitutional crisis, which is too abstract-sounding and seemingly removed from everyday concerns to convulse the street.) For now, the best to hope for is that Trump’s success will sow the seeds of his eventual failure. Having displaced the liberal establishment, he will be blamed for his inability to come through on anything beyond dismantling, destroying and taking revenge. With few exceptions, the GOP has always prospered only in opposition. And it is hard to oppose a spirit of negation. Still, as either Talleyrand or Dean Inge once said, you can build a throne with bayonets, but you cannot sit on it.
[See also: Trump’s hostile takeover of religion]
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