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“What are we living through?”

Brian Leiter

A philosopher asked me to open a discussion of this thoughtful piece by two law professors (David Pozen of Columbia and Jedediah Purdy of Duke), which Professor Pozen had kindly sent to me when it appeared. As I told him, I think their essay leaves out the most important fact, which is that Trump is totally sui generis as a personality: the Holmesian “Bad Man” on steroids, without genuine moral conscience, on whom the only constraint is threat of bad consequences. (Yes, Trump’s ascension to power is a result of the economic circumstances; but his psychological peculiarity is not.) In any case, let me open this for reactions from readers. I will only approve comments that are responsive to the linked essay and that give reasons for or against the essay’s arguments.

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22 responses to ““What are we living through?””

  1. John Pillette

    According to Pozen and Purdy all the Dems need do is come up with “some combination” of anti-positions to win against Trumpismo. In other words, keep doing the same thing, only harder. No need to some up with any kind of a positive platform to vote for, just tell the great mass of the plain people what to vote against. And if we can enlist the right celebrity (maybe Taylor Swift?) to deliver the message this time around we can’t lose! After all, why pay attention to electoral results when Pew and Gallup both say that Trump isn’t “really” popular. And because he doesn’t have a “popular mandate” what’s currently going on isn’t really happening.

    I’m unfamiliar with Pozen, but I’ve long felt that Purdy, as an echt liberal, is simply not equipped to understand the world as it actually exists. In fact, has anyone ever seen Purdy in person, or is he a proto-AI hologram? I think the Rabbis of the DNC, inspired by the Golem of Prague, may have conjured him up out of some inanimate material, maybe old NPR tote bags.

    Their Golemic usefulness aside, our intellectual Purdies can’t seem to get their heads around the basic fact that the actually-existent America is a commercial society, not some shining city on the hill. Trump is sui generis as a political personality—but as a commercial personality he is run-of-the mill.

    Reply
  2. Justin Fisher

    For those who want a TLDR, their main claim seems to be that different people would view Trumpism as either:

    1. A radical dangerous turn towards authoritarianism,
    2. A continuation of long-present structural injustices, or
    3. A much-needed course-correction after decades of liberal overreach.

    The authors seemed to be more inclined to depict symmetries between these stances, and to depict them as being irreconcilably different, rather than to stake a personal position about which is actually correct.

    In contrast, I think one of these three stances is obviously wrong, and that it’s obvious that a mix of the other two is right. So from my view, there’s no good point in laying these out as though they were on similar footing. Instead it would be better to say that Trump has (2) heightened disturbing threads that have long been present in our country, AND (1) amplified these threads to unprecedently dangerous levels. Sure, there’s also (3) a small minority who think everything Trump’s doing is great, but they’re mistaken on moral and likely also factual grounds.

    Reply
    1. Mark J Engleson

      To use an analogy: it’s as though we’ve long had gorillas running wild, but Trump is King Kong. There’s a continuity there, but it’s taken to new, terrifying dimensions.

      Reply
    2. Patrick Muller

      I don’t believe your third framing has any merit.
      “a small minority who think everything Trump’s doing is great, but they’re mistaken […]”. I don’t believe there’s ever been any president such that people thought “everything” they did was great. There’s certainly a number of presidents where people largely agreed, and this seems to be the case with Trump, too (see below), in line with the authors’ third framing. Reading comments and commentaries on this blog keeps reminding me how gigantic the knowledge-gap is among academics, of everyday Walmart Americans.

      In an attempt to start closing it, here’s the Harvard Harris Poll on the popularity of Trump’s policies since his 2025 inauguration, in total support, democrat support, and republican support:

      – Deporting immigrants who are here illegally and have committed crimes: 81% 70% 92%
      – Undertaking a full-scale effort to find and eliminate fraud and waste in government expenditures 76% 62% 90%
      – Closing the border with added security and policies that discourage illegal crossings 76% 61% 92%
      – Banning men who have undergone operations and hormones to become women from girls’ sports: 69% 50% 86%
      – Declaring that there are only two genders male and female in all government forms and programs: 68% 44% 90%
      – Eliminating all preferences by race in the hiring and awarding of government contracts: 65% 44% 86%
      – Freezing and re-evaluating all foreign aid expenditures and the department that handled them: 63% 40% 86%
      – Placing reciprocal tariffs on countries that have tariffs on US goods: 61% 36% 86%
      – Cutting government expenditures that were already allocated by Congress: 59% 35% 85%
      – Ending bans on offshore drilling in Alaska and elsewhere: 57% 35% 82%
      – Renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America: 39% 21% 63%

      Some of these numbers indicate an extreme disconnect between even self-identifying democrats and what “democrat” [sic] politicians and media outlets advocate for (and indeed academics). No wonder CNN repeatedly reported the democrats’ favourability ratings in the low 20%s.

      In my view, the big challenge the Americans face is a special case of authoritarianism AND popularity (so a combination of 1 and 3), where the very reason Trump was voted in is BECAUSE people expected him, a criminal, mafia-boss-like personality, to ignore and where possible even destroy bureaucratic hurdles which they see as working against American citizens. No amount of name calling, be it “Nazi”, or “faschist”, or “authoritarian”, or “mafioso” will work against Trump, because his supporters don’t believe a “normal” politician would be able to work in accordance with their will in the first place. This amalgamation of “voted-for authoritarianism” is a profound and interesting problem in political philosophy and democratic thought, and in my view, it’s a shame that its presence is missed because of a lack of interest to understand what’s even going on. People much rather start with their preferred conclusion.

      It also stands in stark contrast to the UK’s authoritarianism problem, where the prime minister continues to defy the people’s will while sitting at a 9% favourability rating, the lowest ever recorded in British History. In that sense, the UK’s authoritarianism problem is much more traditional.

      Reply
      1. Brian Leiter

        I’m at a loss to understand the relevance of the poll data. Yes, vast majorities approve of, “Deporting immigrants who are here illegally and have committed crimes,” but that is not what Trump is doing. The same with, “Undertaking a full-scale effort to find and eliminate fraud and waste in government expenditures.” And so on. If people actually approved of defying the courts, depriving immigrants of due process and free speech rights, usurping Congress’s power of the purse, engaging in extra-legal murders on the high seas etc., that would have no bearing at all on whether this moved us towards authoritarianism or was defensible.

        Reply
      2. Attila Tanyi

        Just on the last paragraph. I take your word on Starmer’s popularity. Even so, what you seem to suggest is that Starmer is authoritarian but he poses the traditional problem (in your vocabulary) because he, unlike Trump, is not supported by the people? Two things. One, Starmer is not like Trump in that he is not authoritarian. He might be a bad PM, but that’s a different issue. Two, UK prime ministers don’t have a bound mandate. They can, and in many cases should, go against the people’s will if this is what they think is best. They might pay the price for this at the polls, but that’s another thing.

        Reply
      3. Patrick Muller

        Re Brian Leiter:
        i) I agree that it would have no or little bearing on whether it was defensible. My comment was a reply to the above, who claimed that it was a small minority who supported “everything” that Trump does. But I also want to understand what is happening here, and so we need to weed out certain readings such as Trump’s actions and policies being completely misaligned with the will of American citizens. Prima facie, they are not, but to your point, even if they were, that doesn’t make them defensible. But *that* to me, though I agree, is a serious and not uncontroversial argument to make about the normative bearings of majority opinions in a democracy…whereas the actual public discourse seems to use “democracy” as an *attack* against Trump’s actions. I do see a tension there and I don’t see it as trivial. I feel the need to point out that my interest in this is purely scientific and philosophical. (unlike when it comes to the UK)

        ii) I understand that your other point is that, in fact, his actions *are* misaligned with the will of the general public. I suppose this might be true for some things, but not for others. Let’s take the Boat Strikes. A whopping 31% say they are “unsure” about whether they support it; certainly this is partly due to disagreements about what the boats actually contained. 51% believe the vessels were carrying drugs, but 43% believe some were civilian or fishing boats. 37% think the strikes are legally authorized, while 38% do not (link below). People’s descriptive beliefs are deeply divided. In several cases, the “conservative” side has been right, in several, they have not been. I think this problem goes much deeper than every single one of the issues, in that it is a problem of media misinformation. All legacy media outlets have lost a lot of traffic (CNN 34%!). while Substack has *gained* 47%. Go figure why… Wish I could say more on this, but the best I can do here is a disappointing “it’s complicated”.

        https://thehill.com/policy/international/5583482-trump-venezuela-strikes-poll/
        https://x.com/JohnWake/status/1979720593596686597/photo/1

        Re Attila Tanyi:
        Your first argument for Starmer not being authoritarian seems to be that unlike Trump, he is not authoritarian. There’s not much I can say to this except point to circularity. Perhaps to expand, clearly, Starmer’s authoritarian government does not boil down to him alone, whereas Trump’s might just. Starmer’s is much more akin to a traditional surveillance authoritarianism (or totalitarianism), where about 12’000 people per annum (according to government numbers) are arrested for social media posts based on someone considering them offensive; that is the baseline, and accordingly ridiculous the arrests. This is the highest number, by far, for any government on Earth (including China and Russia). Most of the comments were the most normal speech you can think of, but I encourage research, not blind belief. If you don’t find this is problematic, think about what a right wing government can (and will!) do with this apparatus, where anyone can be arrested based on someone finding their statement offensive. Arrests have gotten so ubiquitous that renting contracts now forbid people from not only distributing, but from *RECEIVING* content that “might be considered offensive” through their internet provider. Friends of mine are now afraid to use the W-lan *at their home* because of it. Also noteworthy is Starmer’s enforcement of mandatory digital ID. After an official government petition, which required 100k signatures in 5 months for a debate in parliament, reached 2.8 million signatures in 1 week, government simply responded with “We will introduce a digital ID” (see below). The UK government is most definitely tilting into textbook totalitarianism. However, again, perhaps this is what you meant: Starmer is not the originator of these egregiously dystopian policies. But he is the prime minister.
        https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/730194

        To your second point, I understand this…though I am no legal positivist. While they might be legally allowed to inflict even the most egregious surveillance totalitarianism (hypothetically) and much more on their citizens during their term, that doesn’t make their actions justified nor does it clear them from allegations of authoritarianism or other -isms.

        Reply
  3. Roger Albin

    The authors are partly correct when they refer to a combination of theories 1 and 2, as is Prof. Leiter with the Holmesian Bad Man. In some respects, this is a familiar story from the 1930s. Hitler and Mussolini weren’t swept into power by voters or a tidal wave of public support. They were both brought into power by conservative elites who needed the popular support embodied in fascist movements to carry out their reactionary but largely conventional agendas. There’s a good account of how Hitler became the Chancellor in Henry Ashby Turner’s Hitler’s Thirty Days to Power, a very depressing example of small factors and small men having major consequences. Once installed in power, Hitler and Mussolini gave their traditional conservative patrons much of what they wanted. Access to the levers of power, however, allowed Hitler and Mussolini the opportunity to pursue objectives their traditional conservative allies regarded as dangerous. So it is with Trump. This administration, with it’s attacks on the regulatory powers of the Federal government, tax policy, abandonment of any efforts to deal with looming environmental problems, and efforts at union busting are fulfilling long-standing conservative goals. Are a lot of Republicans happy about Trump’s tariff policies? No, but for them, it’s literally the price of doing business.

    This is not say that Trump is a fascist, though a number of his advisers likely qualify as fascists. Authentic fascism requires at least a crude ideology, something that is beyond his limited intellectual powers. He is an unprincipled bigot with a talent for channeling popular resentments. He is a narcissist and the walking-talking embodiment of the Dunning-Kruger effect, and that’s bad enough, particularly in the context of a Republican Party that seems bent on vindicating Marx & Engels.

    Reply
  4. Charles Bakker

    I’ll never forget a conversation I had with a fellow graduate student the day after Donald Trump was elected for his first term. Like most of my colleagues, this student was left-leaning in many ways, so one would have thought that he would be sad. Instead, he was giddy. He was from South America, you see, and in his opinion the deeply immoral Americans had more than earned the negative repercussions which would surely follow from voting in this narcissistic, lying idiot. Too many American companies and government agents had been allowed to tamper with his country’s well-being for too long.

    As a Canadian, I must acknowledge that Canada has long benefited from America’s tampering with other countries. Indeed, for most of my life I too have uncritically bought into the way in which Americans have framed their foreign policy. Americans portray themselves as liberators, keepers of the peace, defenders of what is right. And they tend to perceive those who disagree, when they even bother to perceive those who disagree, as blinded by lies.

    Then the President of Canada’s closest ally started referring to our Prime Minister as the “governor” of America’s 51st state. It’s just a joke, we are still being told by America’s utterly incompetent ambassador. It’s just Trump being Trump. But to Canadians these words are not a joke; not when they are uttered by the same man who conjures up a drug-trafficking emergency in order to extort our country into entering into a patently one-sided trade “deal.” (By the way, many Canadians are in favour of better policing the border, as there are far too many illegal guns being smuggled in from the States.) Real Canadians are losing their jobs because the man voted in by our literal friends and family is actively trying to force our nation to become a part of a country which is clearly falling apart.

    Apparently, none of this warrants more than a passing reference in Purdy and Pozen’s essay, however. For it is just understood that the “we” in the question “What are we living through?” refers to Americans. Yet it is not just Americans who are living through Trump’s second term, or the decades of political issues which Purdy and Pozen refer to. The rest of the world has had to try to figure out what to make of Trump’s America as well. Will Americans someday “liberate” Canadians from an economic crisis caused in large part by the Americans themselves? Will they annex us for the purpose of protecting us from our “real” enemies, namely whomever poses a threat to Americans from the north? Maybe they will tax us for the smoke coming from forest fires which American industry has done so much to make ever-increasingly more likely. There was a time when all of these scenarios would have seemed impossible, but that time has now long passed.

    Canada’s relation to its neighbour to the south has been forever altered. The same goes for every other traditional ally of the United States of America. We have all been burned, badly, by having become over-reliant upon a global economy policed by the Americans. We will not be making that mistake again. This will have lasting effects on American politics, as each new elected official going forward will be forced to grapple with a world that has become, if not explicitly hostile to Americans, at least wary of them, and certainly less willing to go along with American foreign policy. And that will remain the case regardless of which, if any, of the three interpretations explicated by Pozen and Purdy turns out to be correct.

    Reply
  5. Robert Allen

    Dear Professor Leiter, If by ‘we’ you/they mean Working Class Catholic Midwestern American, things are as good as they are likely to get this side of Eternity. We are living through a restoration of the prosperous way of life enjoyed by people around here-Detroit- when I was growing up. (DJT is to America what St. Pope Pious 10 was to Holy Mother Church.) We simply cannot understand why POTUS DJT’s detractors begrudge us this upgrade in our standard of living or deny that we are much better off under his leadership. TY SO much for the opportunity to post these pressing thoughts. Respectfully yours in Philosophy and Nietzsche (I can’t wait to get to your anthologized take on his view of Free Will) Robert Allen

    Reply
  6. Attila Tanyi

    A good analysis would be needed to see more clearly what the primary causes are of this turn toward autocracy in the US. Something like The Authoritarian Personality, something properly based on data but is also strong on the theory side. I don’t think these questions can be answered from the armchair. (Having said this, the requested analysis might already exist. I confess to ignorance in the matter.) A parallel study could also be made of the UK. Brexit predated Trump and now we have Reform UK in the ascendance, so it seems the two societies are in some respects similar. The differences would be perhaps more enlightening, though.

    Reply
    1. Charles Pigden

      It does. The relevant psychologist, who recently died, was Robert Altemeyer.

      Reply
      1. Attila Tanyi

        Thanks.

        Reply
  7. Natalie Arriola

    Though an interesting article, I think it misses the point in a huge way. Splintered political views are the result of a complete reordering of how we receive information in the internet age. How can we expect to bring majorities together under any one ideological system when we are each presented with a perfect online microcosm of precisely whatever it is we wish to believe echoed back at us every time we engage with social media? Even established media platforms like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fox News, CNN, etc. have become subject to representation of extreme polarized views as influenced by internet chatter. I do not believe the issue at hand has anything to do with the “three camps”–or even necessarily Donald Trump beyond the immediate threat he imposes–which they present in the article, but rather with how we form a unified democracy in an age where almost any idea, no matter how ill informed, can catch fire and spread across the multitude of fragmented groups forming on the internet.

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  8. John Pillette

    I decided I was maybe being unfair to Purdy (and to Pozen by association with him), based mostly on my intense dislike for Purdy’s first book. Which book came out, I’ve realized, 26 years ago! Tempus fugit etc. So in the interest of fairness I took a second look at Purdy and Pozen.

    They both belong to something at Columbia Law School called the “Constitutional Democracy Initiative”, which is the brainchild of Columbia President Lee Bollinger, conceived as a response to the Capitol Hill insurrection. (Yes THAT Bollinger, I won’t elaborate. But, the company you keep …) So, in response to an actual revolt, with pitchforks and everything, the liberal response (reasonable enough as far as it goes) is to convene the best and brightest to address widespread “dissatisfaction with democracy”. But does this sort of thing go far enough? Does it go anywhere at all?

    Because the Initiative does not investigate widespread dissatisfaction with the material conditions of life in America in 2025, but with the abstract concept of “democracy”. You can see where this is going: if the people would only change their way of thinking about America, the problem would be solved. The initative seems to me to be an example of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.

    I suppose it may be unreasonable to expect a pair of law professors to approach this problem in any other way, but shouldn’t an “Initiative” that seeks to cure our democratic vulnerability be a little more inter-disciplinary? Aren’t they a little curious about the underlying causes, ones that make an Elmer Gantryish TV con man an attractive candidate?

    A cynic might remark that the orientation of the Initiative is anti-radical, designed not to investigate root causes but to provide ideological fodder for the sacred cow of managerial liberalism.

    Reply
  9. Brian Leiter

    Patrick Muller writes: “I agree that [polls] would have no or little bearing on whether it was defensible. My comment was a reply to the above, who claimed that it was a small minority who supported ‘everything’ that Trump does.” I understood your point, and my point was that the poll showed agreement wiht things that are NOT what Trump is doing. Trump is deporting law-abiding immigrants who have been productive members of the community. There is little support for that. And so down almost the entire list. So enough with the silly polls!

    It’s beyond silly, however, to call Starmer an authoritarian, and I really don’t want this thread further derailed into this sewer. 12,000 people per annum in the UK are not being “arrested for social media posts” become someone thinks they’re “offensive”: they are being arrested when the posts prima facie appear to violate English law (which includes hate speech laws).

    Finally, let me say, for the benefit of any readers ignorant of legal philosophy, that being a “legal positivist” is irrelevant to whether one can object to lawful actions by the state: it is the most basic commitment of legal positivism that what the law is is one thing, and whether the law is any good or fair or just is a wholly separate question.

    Reply
    1. Patrick Muller

      I understand your point and responded to it accordingly. There is great disagreement about the facts of the matter between the political sides, which is a huge problem. In your example of deportations, it is true that Trump does this. The estimated percentage of non-criminal legal permanent resident (LPR) deportations under the Trump administration is 10-20% of total LPR removals. The conservatives are not fixated on this, because under Obama, it was 10-15%, and under Biden, it was 10-15%, and so Trump’s number to them looks normal (so does the total number of deportations!).

      Your response reads to me as if I was defending Trump in any way. I am not. Indeed, to me it should be closer to 0-1% for *all three* presidents. And I find the way in which the administration organises deportations inhuman, in stark contrast to Obama and Biden. But I also find it instrumental to understand where the differences in understanding between pro- and anti-Trumpists are, especially when trying to understand a cultural phenomenon (like in the article you posted). In this specific example, Trumpsters simply don’t seem to believe that there is a comparatively excessive deportation of non-criminal LPR’s happening in the first place. This is important to know, if not for anything else, then to know your enemy!

      No comment on the Starmer issue, then. I encourage everyone to look into the details of the arrests. There are thousands of videos.

      Re legal positivism: Whoops, yes, false negation in the first line! The rest of the paragraph fits.

      Reply
  10. Abhishek Chatterjee

    Another (non-mutually exclusive) way of looking at the Trump administration is that he’s trying to graft patrimonialism (to use Weber’s terminology) into an ostensibly legal-rational system. This can explain his tendency to treat branches of the government as an extension of his household, and specifically, things like demanding equity shares in companies. Interestingly, the latter has led some centrist Democrats to accuse him of being a “communist.” But historically this has been the usual behavior of many patrimonial regimes, both nominally “socialist,” and “non- socialist” (the terms under quotes basically represent ideological justifications or attempts at legitimizing certain policies. So, you can imagine a 2X2 table with putative ideology on one dimension, and nature of bureaucracy on the other). Now patrimonialism is often conterminous with some degree of authoritarianism, even though it can exist simultaneously with (some degree of) electoralism. This is also where your (i.e. Prof. Leiter’s) past characterization of him as a mafia boss is apt (since mafias also tend to be patrimonial).

    Reply
  11. John Pillette

    Looking into what “the American People” do or do not approve of (whether revealed by a poll instrument or not) can lead to some unpleasant surprises. As a do-gooding ACLU law clerk way back when I was alarmed when an otherwise impeccably liberal family member opined that prison reform was foolish. Because jails and prisons SHOULD operate on a fundamentally sadistic basis: inmates should expect to be raped and beaten and so on.

    If you object, like I did, that this is barbaric, you may discover that an ostensibly liberal American doesn’t care. Prison is supposed to be cruel, you sissy! And this was in Fairfield County, Conn. I can only imagine what they think in Alabama. So how many Americans think this way? I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure it’s more than I’m comfortable with. In any event, I’m sure the number of us who are appropriately currently shocked, appalled, etc. by what we are living through is a lot smaller than we think it is.

    The law (especially in the form of the ACLU and the rest of the liberal 501c3 world) isn’t really equipped to deal with these issues. But more fundamentally this sector’s mindset can’t seem to even take this question of human cruelty on board. It seems to be a funding requirement for these places to believe that Americans are fundamentally wonderful, that any eruption of fascism is somehow not part of the American character, and so everything will soon return to some cuddly bipartisan status quo ante.

    I have my doubts. I submit that a dictatorship would easily be popular ENOUGH enough to succeed. Let’s not get hypnotized by numbers. A dictator doesn’t need a 50.1% referendum result.

    Some of you may have seen Kamala Harris’s interview with a media personality by the name of “Charlemagne tha God” … (I guess in the world of hip-hop calling yourself merely Charles the Great is hiding your light under a bushel) Anyway, what Charles wanted to know was, why wasn’t Biden being a strongman? Why wasn’t Biden being a dictator? Because everyone who tunes in to his show, all those guys and gals who watch fun gangster movies and listen to fun gangster rap, they all WANT a gangster/ dictator. They expect and demand a “president” of the banana variety.

    You can go on YouTube and watch Kamala completely flub this “teachable moment” and draw your own conclusions from that, I won’t spoil this bit to political theatre for you.

    Reply
  12. LFC

    This piece is divided into two main parts: diagnosis and prescription. In terms of diagnosis, I think there’s a significant difference between, on the one hand, a flawed democracy with elements of oligarchy and, on the other hand, a system that has descended into a species of authoritarianism. The view that Britton-Purdy and Pozen call the “authoritarian-crisis” view is the one that recognizes that difference, and therefore it’s the one I would choose if I had to choose between their three options for diagnosis.

    However, as they write toward the end, “the authoritarian-crisis account and the more-of-the-same account have begun to merge and hybridize in a way that did not happen during Trump’s first term.” This, I think, is a key point, and leads to their suggestion that anti-authoritarian and anti-oligarchy themes perhaps can be emphasized at the same time.

    The authors probably pay a bit too much deference to the third view, which they label the constitutional-regime-change view. As they seem to realize, what is going on now is not simply the narrow majority of the electorate that voted for Trump in 2024 seeing its desires put into action. A rancher in Montana who voted for Trump was almost certainly not voting for Project 2025’s agenda to take a wrecking ball to the civil service and federal agencies, a project about which he or she was likely quite indifferent for the most part (if not against in some respects). No administration’s policy agenda and actions, and especially not this one’s, can simply be “read off” from the election results, especially a razor-close election like the 2024 one (as they point out).

    The takeaway message of this piece, at least as I see it, is that one doesn’t have to choose between the “authoritarian-crisis” view and the “more-of-the-same” view, but that the two can be synthesized in theory and, one hopes, melded at least to some extent in practice. And if some people who voted for Trump in 2024 but are not happy with the first nine or ten months of the Trump 2.0 administration can be brought along, so much the better.

    Reply
  13. MP

    It’s also possible we’re living through something akin to Steve Skrowronek’s concept of a disjunction, where Trump represents the collapse of the political coalition (and its associated ideological commitments) that has governed America since Reagan. If that’s true then one would expect the next president to 1) be a Democrat and 2) reconstruct American politics around a new set of assumptions and commitments that are in some sense a repudiation of the prior political regime’s. There was talk about how Trump was a disjunctive president (in Skrowronek’s sense) back during Trump 1.0 … but then Biden failed to usher in a transformation of American politics and Trump won the presidency again. But I think it’s still a live possibility given the GOP’s ongoing (ideological and otherwise) crackup.

    Either way, we won’t know (it’s not knowable) until it’s happened. Events will either 1) result in this administration full of Holmesian bad actors bringing about a form of authoritarianism or oligarchy that is clearly different in kind from what has come before in America; 2) reveal just another sordid chapter in the American experiment; 3) lead us (however begrudgingly) to the conclusion that Trumpism succeeded on the cultural and economic terms it set for itself (creating, in the process, a broadly prosperous and thoroughly reactionary middle class); or 4) (via disjunction) usher in a new era of progress /influence for the American left.

    This observation — essentially, who knows! — isn’t particularly helpful. But I think it’s true.

    Reply
  14. John Pillette

    I’ve been chuckling over the idea of an “Authoritarian Keir Starmer” for a few days now. What’s so funny? In every picture I’ve seen of him since the change of government he looks as if he’s just shit his pants. It would help the cause of the labor party if someone could teach him to try and appear to be a little more authoritarian, to try and find and then channel his inner Stalin, at least when a camera is pointed at him.

    There’s an irony of sorts here in that Starmer is obviously a capable bureaucratic infighter. He was able to ascend the greasy pole of inter-party politics (by inter alia efficiently stabbing Corbyn in the back), and he strikes me as someone who would gladly sell his Gran to Al-Qaida for a bump in his poll numbers, but being a front-facing leader seems beyond his skill set.

    Since someone has already brought up Weber, may we consider the sort of “soft” authoritarianism (the famous stahlhartes gehause) that he thought was an inevitable part modernity? Voters look at characters like Starmer and see enthusiasts for this bureaucratic “cage”. And we’ve all met people who are less interested in ushering in the benefits of modernity than in the pleasure they derive from placing others in a cage … for the good of the caged, of course.

    Reply

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