Progressives, especially in the U.S., are prone to bouts of romanticism about the Nordic countries. But things aren’t quite so rosy in reality—especially for immigrants and minorities. Denmark in particular has taken a hard turn to the right on immigration—so much so that Britain’s increasingly anti-immigration Labour Party, under pressure from Farage’s rising Reform UK, has said it is looking to emulate Denmark’s hardline asylum stance.

Since 2022, Denmark’s Social Democratic prime minister Mette Frederiksen has led an increasingly right-leaning coalition government. Initially head of a minority Social Democratic government, Frederiksen has, to be sure, inherited a slew of immigrant-hostile policies. In 2016, Denmark passed a controversial “jewelry law” legalizing the confiscation of asylum seekers’ personal possessions, including cash and jewelry above a certain value, to offset public spending. While the law has only rarely come into use, raising little revenue over the past decade, its real significance is its messaging effect, signaling Denmark’s shift to a nativist stance. The jewelry law’s racialized underpinnings were disclosed when the country, in 2022, clarified that it aimed to make an exemption for Ukrainian refugees, even as its treatment of Syrian arrivals was hardening—a case of “mismatched treatment” decried by Human Rights Watch, which rightly argued that Denmark should “widen its embrace of Ukrainian refugees to include others as well.”

Meanwhile, in 2018, the government at the time announced a series of policy measures, known as the “ghetto plan,” designed to “combat parallel societies”—a nefarious term increasingly adopted in the Nordic countries’ political lexicon. Amid a moral panic about minorities, Islam, crime rates, and the “sustainability” of the welfare state, the government made a deal with the right-wing nationalist Danish People’s Party to ensure “that residents with a non-Western background will make up a maximum of 30 percent in all residential areas in Denmark by 2030.” Controversially, the government promised to enact “strategic demolitions” in particularly “vulnerable areas” to ram through its program of urban reconfiguration; it also promised to double sentencing levels for certain kinds of crime committed in the areas, violating the principle of equality before the law. “In these areas,” the conservative minister of justice at the time said, “it is clear that the hammer of the law will fall heavier than elsewhere.” One lawyer described the proposal as “un-Danish”; a former immigration minister, Birthe Rønn Hornbech, called it a “crazy proposal.”

Social Democrats Go Nativist

This was the policy climate that Frederiksen inherited when she took office in 2019. But the center-left prime minister has pushed for anti-immigration policies of her own. In 2022, the Danish government declared that it was exploring a UK-style offshoring of asylum seekers to Rwanda—though the plans were quietly shelved the next year. Denmark’s Social Democrats have tightened rules on family reunification, and refugees can have their residency permits revoked and, potentially, be deported if authorities deem conditions in their country of origin sufficiently safe. A wave of such revocations hit Syrian refugees in Denmark in 2022, sparking condemnation from Amnesty International; as one of the refugees’ lawyers said to the New York Times, these actions were taken by the Danish government “in order to send a message to the world that Denmark is the worst place to go as an asylum seeker from Syria.”

It was a familiar tactic. A decade earlier, the country’s Venstre government had run a controversial ad campaign in Lebanese newspapers, aimed at the more than one million Syrian refugees living in Lebanon, that warned that Denmark’s social benefits had been cut and that there “will be a special return centre for rejected asylum seekers to ensure [they]…leave Denmark as quickly as possible.” Would-be migrants were in effect being told that Denmark was closing the door on unwanted migration—what the BBC earlier this year described as Denmark’s “explicit talk about a zero asylum seekers policy.” In January 2021, Mattias Tesfaye, the Social Democratic Minister for Immigration and Integration, said that “the goal is zero asylum seekers.” The day after, Prime Minister Frederiksen emphasized the government couldn’t “make a promise of zero asylum seekers”—even if that was the goal—but it could “set out the vision” that the government wanted “a completely new asylum system.”

Making good on the promise, Frederiksen teamed up with Italy’s right-wing prime minister Giorgia Meloni earlier this year, explicitly challenging the European Convention on Human Rights and calling, euphemistically, for “the right balance” on immigration. It was a stunning alliance between a Nordic social-democratic leader and the head of what has been described as “Italy’s most right-wing government” since the Second World War.

The Meloni–Frederiksen initiative was said to be in response to immigrants who have “chosen not to integrate, isolating themselves in parallel societies”—again, a loaded right-wing term. “We have to lower the influx of migrants to Europe,” Frederiksen said, speaking in Strasbourg six weeks later. “What has been mainstream among our populations for quite many years,” she said, appearing to celebrate this rightward shift, “is now mainstream for many of us politicians as well, finally.” And as Frederiksen warned later in the fall:

Denmark is the best country in the world. If that is to continue, all parts of immigration policy must be in order. And that is why it must continue to be strict. … So that we can take care of the Danes, our democracy and our lovely country.

Denmark, this “lovely country”—a patriotic phrase resonant with nineteenth-century Romanticism—was increasingly slamming the door shut on refugees. Frederiksen’s rhetoric would not be foreign to Trump. Where Trump was, and is, “America First,” Frederiksen was increasingly “Denmark first”—to the exclusion of growing numbers.

Self-Defeating Ethnonationalism

The conventional view has been that Frederiksen’s rightward shift on immigration has been a case of hard-nosed pragmatism—a center-left leader forced into survival mode in the age of Trump, and a necessary move to stave off the threat of rising right-wing populism. In an interview with the New York Times earlier this year, Frederiksen claimed that her government’s tough-on-immigration stance was the “main reason that her party returned to power and has remained in office even as the left has flailed elsewhere.”

But recent local elections in Denmark have started to cast that idea into doubt. Earlier in November, Frederiksen’s Social Democrats shed more than 150 seats in the country’s municipal and regional councils, with the party’s share of overall votes dropping from 28.4% in the 2021 elections to 23.2% this year—a significant five-point decline. Meanwhile, the Green Left (Socialistisk Folkeparti, or SF) gained 80 councilors and saw overall support rise from 7.6% to 11.1%. The even more left-leaning Red-Green Alliance (Enhedslisten) saw its support held firm at just above 7%, a touch lower than the 2021 result.

The Social Democrats’ losses in the capital, Copenhagen, were especially bracing: the mayoralty fell from the Social Democrats to the Green Left for the first time since the position of lord mayor was established in 1938. “After 122 years of Social Democrat rule in Copenhagen,” Politico recently reported, “the party’s candidate, Pernille Rosenkrantz–Theil, was not even invited to attend negotiations to form the capital’s next government.”

We should be careful not to exaggerate the Social Democrats’ decline. Frederiksen’s government remains in power: municipal elections don’t reshape national leadership. But the idea that the center left must pivot to the right has taken a dent in these recent elections. The notion that the left must “go nativist” to avoid defeat right-wing populism is looking far less secure.

Denmark’s nativism also runs far deeper than Frederiksen’s current coalition government, in power since 2022. As shown above, the country’s hard ethnonationalism of the past decade has, to a remarkable degree, been the product of a cross-party consensus, from the right to the center left, a pan-ideological “common sense”—with the exception of pockets of resistance on the left.

Denmark’s nativism has cut across party divides, an ideology mobilized on behalf of an ethnos, or (allegedly) undivided people. Politicians across the political spectrum have framed these hostile policies as an effort to protect the nation, culture, and welfare state against groups viewed as unintegrated (and resisting integration), destabilizing, and dangerous. This also means that unseating the Social Democrats won’t necessarily improve the lot of foreigners, migrants, or minorities.

Hygge as Selective Marketing

Of course, this is not at all in keeping with the liberal, if not outright libertarian, image that Denmark has projected onto the world stage in recent decades, especially in the realm of culture. Modern Danish culture has long been bold—especially in movies, from its early-twentieth century Golden Age cinema to the avant-garde filmmaking movement Dogme 95. But some are beginning to see through this: As a Guardian contributor put it, “If you think Denmark is all Borgen and social equality, take a look at its awful ‘ghetto’ law.”

To be sure, there have always been deeply problematic sides to this story, like Denmark’s colonial vestiges in Greenland. But the most recent turn to nativism is a marked shift away from a worldview premised on cosmopolitanism, cultural experimentation, and liberal humanism. It’s a worldview that has stood the country in remarkably good stead.

In fact, Denmark’s self-marketing has been remarkably successful: think hygge, the anodyne notion that Danish culture, or even “Scandi” culture as a whole, revolves around a cozy, comforting lifestyle—“taking time away from the daily rush to be together with people you care about,” a kind of pumpkin spice latte for the soul forged into governing cultural ethos. Missing from this cozy vision is the fact that Denmark’s hygge now comes with a side of exclusionary nativism.

To others in the Nordic countries, Denmark has been an important cultural reference point. Now, instead, Denmark functions less like a cultural avant-garde than a nativist vanguard, with the other Nordics emulating Denmark’s hardline politics: from Sweden’s immigration minister’s proposed 50-percent cap on “non-Nordic” residents in “vulnerable areas”—explicitly modeled on Denmark’s policies—to Norway’s right-wing Progress Party advocating “zero net immigration from high-risk countries” and “zero asylum immigration to Norway"—again, borrowing from Denmark’s playbook.

The End of the Road?

The recent election results from Denmark suggest that imitating the right isn’t the guaranteed winning strategy that Frederiksen and the Social Democrats have long thought. Defeating political adversaries by emulating those adversaries might lead to short-term electoral gains—might, mind you—though as Denmark’s recent local elections show, this is far from certain: Danish voters, especially in Copenhagen, are fed up with Frederiksen’s rightward tilt.

Of course, the idea that the left should emulate the right in order to stem its rise and remain in power is self-defeating: What’s the point of staying in power if it means abandoning core values like inclusivity and solidarity? Staving off right-wing populism by adopting right-wing policies will also bring real hardship to those affected by these policies, and so is in itself problematic.

But it’s also poor political craftsmanship. As Grace Blakeley points out, “Over time, left parties that pursue such a strategy erode their own base.” Denmark’s nativist turn, political scientist Cas Mudde writes, will “push away progressive voters, particularly younger ones, who want a party that is socioeconomically and socioculturally leftwing.” Copying the right risks demobilizing core progressive voters, eroding any authentic enthusiasm for the progressive project of building a more humane, inclusive social order. In a world of growing hatreds, this is the vision to which the left must remain true.

Increasingly, it also looks like the only thing that will keep nativists and nationalists from taking power. Only a radically inclusive social vision can spark the kind of enthusiasm needed to mobilize against the populist right’s politics of division and despair.

Earlier this year, Norway’s $2.1 trillion Oil Fund—the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund—was the subject of a heated public debate over its links to Israel’s war in Gaza. In June, a group of Norwegian academics, the Historians for Palestine, revealed that the fund owned shares worth nearly $30 million in the Israeli company Bet Shemesh Engines, which reportedly maintained engine parts used by Israeli jets conducting airstrikes on Gaza. Beginning in 2023, the fund had increased its investment stake in the Israeli company in tandem with Israel’s mounting attacks on Gaza and rising Palestinian civilian deaths. The academics delivered their findings to the Norwegian Ministry of Finance in June. The Labour government, it seems, did nothing with them.

Instead, as in many countries, the political establishment—and Norway as a whole—went into shutdown mode as summer wore on. July is typically a slow season in Norway, the so-called “cucumber time” (agurktid), when most serious journalism and affairs of state are put on hold—even with a looming national election only a few months away in September.

By early August, as the country’s media and political establishment roused itself from its slumber and began gearing up for five weeks of election campaigning, the liberal-conservative newspaper Aftenposten broke the Bet Shemesh story to a wider audience (though without crediting the Historians for Palestine). The result was a firestorm of commentary and, understandably, fierce attacks on the Labour government, primarily from the smaller left-wing parties on its flank, the Green Party, and civil-society groups.

Sensing a real electoral vulnerability, Finance Minister Jens Stoltenberg—a seasoned former prime minister, decade-long secretary general of NATO, and now responsible for the $2.1 trillion fund—sprang into action. Promising a complete review of the fund’s links to Israel’s war economy, Stoltenberg held a series of “crisis meetings” with Norges Bank Investment Management (NBIM), the fund’s manager. Stoltenberg presented himself as a sober helmsman amid a growing political storm: Norway would take its ethical and legal obligations seriously, and the Norwegian people’s “pensions”—or oil earnings—would not be used to profit from the genocide in Gaza.

By late August—with just two weeks to go until the national election—the Oil Fund announced it was divesting from five Israeli banks as well as Caterpillar, a U.S. bulldozer manufacturer whose products were reportedly being used in Israeli demolitions in Gaza and the West Bank. “There is no doubt,” the Oil Fund’s semi-independent ethics council wrote, “that Caterpillar’s products are being used to commit extensive and systematic violations of international humanitarian law.” The five Israeli banks, meanwhile, were excluded for financing construction activities that “contribute to the maintenance of Israeli settlements” in occupied Palestinian territories.

All told, Labour’s moves were bold, in alignment with Norway’s global reputation as a defender of human rights. The divestments from the six companies, totaling around $3 billion in value, were made “due to an unacceptable risk that the companies contribute to serious violations of the rights of individuals in situations of war and conflict,” Norway’s central bank wrote in announcing the divestment.

From Labour’s perspective, this was a domestic success story: The electoral vulnerability had been plugged, and crisis had been averted. The September election saw Labour claim more than a quarter of the vote, allowing it to cling to power against a rebellious left and an increasingly popular right-wing Progress Party, which came in second. Labour wasn’t about to yield power to the right over the fund’s financial entanglements with Israel’s Gaza war and occupation.

Trump 2.0 and Labour’s About-Face

But on the other side of the Atlantic, Norway’s ethics decision was proving more contentious. Senior U.S. Republican leaders lashed out at the oil-rich nation’s divestments. Less than a day after the Caterpillar decision, Senator Lindsey Graham tweeted angrily:

To Norway’s sovereign wealth fund – which is the largest in the world: Your decision to punish Caterpillar, an American company, because Israel uses their product is beyond offensive. Your BS decision will not go unanswered.

Other Republican senators followed suit. Senate Republican leader John Thune called the Norwegian embassy in Washington, D.C. to express his discontent. Similarly, Senator Dave McCormick of Pennsylvania wrote to Norway’s Washington ambassador to voice his “extreme concern,” framed menacingly in terms of Norway’s security relationship with the United States: The fund was divesting from companies that “produce weapons that are critical to the security of the United States and Norway.” Meanwhile, Trump’s State Department said it was “very troubled by the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund’s decision” and was “engaging directly with the Norwegian government on this matter.”

In effect, Norway—a small country of 5.6 million people, about the same size as Minnesota—was being pressured by Trump’s allies to drop its ethics stance. Trump had already pressured Finance Minister Stoltenberg over the Nobel Peace Prize, going so far as to call Stoltenberg to say that he “wanted the Nobel Prize.” Forging ahead might risk Norway’s security relationship with the United States under Trump 2.0.

And this is where the Oil Fund story turns—abruptly.

By early November, in a shock parliamentary decision, the Labour Party made a hard pivot to the right, joining forces with some of its toughest (supposed) electoral adversaries—the right-wing Progress Party, Conservative Party, and Christian Democratic Party—as well as a former coalition partner, the agrarian-ethnonationalist Centre Party, to revoke the exclusionary powers of the Oil Fund’s ethics council. “The world has changed since the ethical guidelines were first adopted,” Finance Minister Stoltenberg said. “The rules need to be reviewed.”

Given the Trump administration’s pressure campaign, the sudden about-face was hardly surprising.

Stoltenberg and the Labour government were happy to pose as ethical stewards of a two-trillion-dollar financial fortune up until the September election. The exclusionary measures they passed, while partial and piecemeal, were real attempts to respond to human-rights pressures from progressives and civil society.

But facing mounting pressure from the Trump administration and its allies, Stoltenberg in particular reverted to his technocratic, security-driven instincts. Trained as an economist, one of Stoltenberg’s political hallmarks had long been to lecture Norwegian reporters on economic trade-offs and the importance of pragmatic decision-making, often with flip chart and marker in hand. And after ten years at NATO’s helm, four of which coincided with Trump’s volatile first term, Stoltenberg not only understood but helped facilitate Trump’s security agenda—including the five-percent spending target.

For more than twenty years, the Norwegian Oil Fund’s five-person ethics council had been empowered to recommend exclusions from the fund’s sprawling investment portfolio—in effect, a power to blacklist “unethical” companies—often with headline-grabbing results. In 2006, the world’s largest retailer, Wal-Mart, was excluded from the fund for its “serious and systematic violations of human rights.” (The exclusion was revoked in 2019.) Tobacco companies like Philip Morris and British American Tobacco were banished in 2010. Nine defense companies including BAE Systems were dropped in 2018 for producing nuclear-weapons components.

No longer.

Instead, the Labour government pushed to put ethics on hold, pending a “new ethical framework.” Stoltenberg claimed the move was necessary: to ensure revenue maximization and avoid the risk of “lower returns,” to avoid divestment from major—primarily U.S.—tech companies, and to allow for investments in large defense companies formerly excluded from the fund. As Stoltenberg said to Bloomberg:

The Caterpillar decision combined with the announcement by the ethics council that they have initiated work on the tech companies: if you combine those two things, we assessed that there is a risk that the current guidelines will lead us to a situation where Norway could potentially divest from some of the world’s largest companies.

But pausing the fund’s ethics was clearly also an act of Trump-driven appeasement, even if it meant alienating Labour’s left-wing partners, and even if it meant blatantly contradicting itself: only months earlier, Labour’s messaging had portrayed the xenophobic, neoliberal Progress Party as its key opponent—now the two parties had teamed up to roll back the fund’s decades-long “responsible investment” practices.

Such is the price of vassalage.

Flexing Trillion-Dollar Muscles

Thanks to its huge oil and gas reserves in the North Sea and a decades-long policy of saving up tax revenues from the lucrative oil trade, Norway now has the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund. It has turned Norway into a global financial player—a rentier capitalist on the world stage—controlling around 1.5 percent of the world’s shares, spread across 8,500 companies.

And it is disproportionately invested in the U.S. economy, following a strategic shift in 2020. Its investments were touted in Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre and Stoltenberg’s Oval Office meeting with Trump in April. As Stoltenberg said then, “Half the fund, close to 1 trillion dollars, are invested in [the] United States…This is an expression of trust in the United States.”

But what is undoubtedly a form of hard financial power is also, for a small country like Norway, a source of vulnerability—especially when prevailing ideological headwinds turn. Whatever leverage Norway possesses exists against the backdrop of a certain largesse or goodwill from the world’s reigning superpower. Making matters worse, the Trump administration is a bit like Sauron’s eye: Any attention is inherently dangerous. Even when lavishing praise, Trump the protectionist racketeer is always near at hand. As soon as Norway’s fund deviated slightly from U.S. interests, as these were construed by the Trump administration, the backlash was predictably furious. This is what it means to be a subordinate nation in the age of MAGA.

This is not to diminish Norway’s responsibility for its investment decisions. What happened in Norway has a clear domestic side. Labour faced a real electoral crisis over Gaza, mainly from the left, and was forced to move to exclude Israeli companies. But once it had “won” the September election—marginally—and the Trump orbit expressed its dissatisfaction with Norway’s ethical exclusions, the Labour government, with Stoltenberg in a lead role, fell back on its most conservative, securitized instincts, cut a deal with the right, and quashed the Oil Fund’s ethical rules.

A combination of a technocratic, nationalistic understanding of Norway’s place within global financial capitalism—aiming to maximize revenue in order to boost domestic spending (on welfare, on infrastructure, and so on), regardless of wider, global ramifications—with a geopolitically motivated desire to appease Trump’s America, has proven overpowering for Norway’s commitment to “ethical capitalism”—however shallow that notion necessarily is. What we are witnessing is the coming together of technocratic nationalism with Trump-world pressure.

So should small countries with two-trillion-dollar fortunes just roll over? Hardly. While Norway will not, for the time being, live up to its ethical obligations to the same degree as in decades past, there remains a robust progressive and civil-society response to Labour’s latest move. Both of Norway’s left-wing parties vocally opposed it. As the Socialist Left Party leader Kirsti Bergstø said, “Our goal is to ensure that the Oil Fund is not invested in genocide, occupation, and serious war crimes. In that situation, the Labour Party and Stoltenberg are choosing to relax the ethical framework—it’s a betrayal.” Similarly, the Red Party’s leader Marie Sneve Martinussen described Labour’s decision as “shocking,” in light of ”two years of genocide and a series of revelations of direct links between the Oil Fund and Israel’s war machine.”

While Labour may be able to ignore such voices in the short term, it surely cannot afford to do so in the long run. The right-wing Progress Party’s leader Sylvi Listhaug—a kind of Norwegian version of Trump, Meloni, or Farage—showed in the most recent election that she was within a hair’s breadth of securing a viable coalition. If Labour wants to avoid a Trumpified Norwegian government in four years’ time, it needs to prove that its politics are a real, credible, and progressive alternative to the right-wing populism that is spreading across the globe. If that means upsetting the Trump White House, then so be it.

Perhaps it is time, after all, to flex those trillion-dollar muscles a little. Even subordinates might find they possess unexpected powers.

Dan Wang, Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future (New York: W. W. Norton, 2025).

Dan Wang’s Breakneck can be read as the center-right counterpart to Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s center-left Abundance. Where Klein and Thompson largely focused on California to make the case for an American “liberalism that builds”—a greener capitalism aiming to deliver higher living standards—Wang pivots to China to make the case for U.S. manufacturing renewal, now from a less progressive, more security-motivated angle.

Breakneck’s story in a nutshell is that the U.S. has lost the capacity to build; China knows how to build; that’s problematic if the U.S. ever gets into a fight with China; and so it needs to (re)learn how to build.

On the U.S side, at least, this is overstating things. The U.S. still does a lot of manufacturing. In 2022, two-thirds of manufactured goods sold in the U.S. were made there—a ten-percentage-point decline from 2005, but still a substantially high share. There are 13 million manufacturing workers in a sector that exports goods worth $1.6 trillion. Trump’s propaganda would have us believe the U.S. has been almost completely deindustrialized; it hasn’t.

Regardless, like Klein and Thompson, Wang wants to remind his readers of the need to rebuild manufacturing capacity. But unlike Abundance, Wang’s plea for American industrial renewal is framed as part of an ongoing geostrategic contest with China. “If the two superpowers fight in East Asia, it’s not at all clear that the United States will win. America has to build to stave off being overrun commercially or militarily by China.” The end goal in Breakneck isn’t so much higher living standards as military advantage. Where Abundance is a manifesto for a progressive producerism, Breakneck is security nationalism in disguise: building in order to win wars, though framed as part of a new political-economic common sense.

So much for goals. What then of the diagnosis? For all the book’s acclaim, Wang’s causal story is astonishingly reductive: China is a society of engineers while the U.S. is a “lawyerly” society. Wang’s argument, like Klein and Thompson’s before him, has something essentially Musk-like about it: in 2020, Elon Musk lamented that “too many smart people go into finance and law” and claimed that Chinese politicians were better at science. Never mind the counterargument by Foreign Policy’s James Palmer that the Chinese leadership’s engineering training is shallow—more technical certificates than elite degrees. And on the American side, while Clinton, Obama, and Biden went to law school, no Republican president since Ford has. Reagan was an actor; the Bushes and Trump were businessmen. The “lawyerly America” argument doesn’t really explain the divergence.

The political-economic differences between the U.S. and China have less to do with higher education and more to do with ideology. Western countries have been dominated by neoliberalism, which is certainly not laissez-faire but is often uninterested in raising welfare through state action. China, meanwhile, has staked regime survival on great bursts of export-led economic growth and an expansive infrastructure program. Their leaders’ worldviews are rooted in very different orthodoxies. Their divergent track records have little to do with the fact that Clinton went to law school, Ivy League graduates opt for finance and law, or that Xi studied chemical engineering. That Breakneck’s reductive thesis has been met with such praise is surprising—though the FT does acknowledge that “readers might cavil at such sweeping generalisations.” It makes more sense once one realizes how neatly it fits dominant security agendas.

Still, Wang insists that the engineers-versus-lawyers social setup translates into a China that builds and an America that doesn’t. In an interview earlier this year, he said his mission was to remind people that “we live in a material world. Let’s build up a manufacturing base as well.” Given Trump’s rhetoric of reindustrialization, Wang’s claim carries with it more than a whiff of Trumpism, though he thinks Trump’s dismantling of parts of the federal government should be refocused from firing personnel to cutting back on processes. Ironically, here Breakneck overlaps with Abundance: Klein and Thompson, too, think America’s potential has been stifled by legalism.

Wang is far from alone in being concerned with industrial policy; in many ways, it is the major policy concern of our times. And it’s hardly a right-wing issue. The Biden administration ran an aggressively expansionist industrial policy—though Wang thinks, typically, and with thin evidence, that the Biden administration was ineffectual. A convergence of factors has prompted this shift: the trauma of Trump 1.0, the COVID-19 pandemic, Russia’s criminal war of aggression against Ukraine, accelerating climate change, and China’s rise—all these have aligned to nudge the West out of its neoliberal equilibrium. Economic sovereignty is back on the policy agenda on both sides of the Atlantic—often with nationalistic, neomercantilist characteristics—across the political spectrum.

And yet, Wang’s plea for American capacity-building lands on the right flank of this policy conversation. The author’s ideological coordinates seem clear enough: a cover blurb by libertarian economist Tyler Cowen; a fellowship with the conservative Hoover Institution; a concern to uphold “American interests”; and an emphasis on manufacturing as a means to geopolitical supremacy, not collective welfare.

Despite this broadly right-coded approach, Breakneck is in many ways deftly diagonal, slicing across the political spectrum in unexpected ways. Wang is fair in his criticisms of Xi’s China in a way that is noticeably more measured than standard hawkish rhetoric. He skewers the Chinese government’s overreach—from zero-Covid lockdowns in Shanghai to heavy-handed one-child policy measures. And Wang is rightly worried that authoritarian, illiberal modes of governance stifle creativity, innovation, and general well-being. Finally, counterintuitively for a Hoover fellow, Wang argues that the CCP is “Communist” in name only—instead, Xi runs on what in the West would be considered by many a right-wing agenda:

The greatest trick that the Communist Party ever pulled off is masquerading as leftist. While Xi Jinping and the rest of the Politburo mouth Marxist pieties, the state is enacting a right-wing agenda that Western conservatives would salivate over: administering limited welfare, erecting enormous barriers to immigration, and enforcing traditional gender roles.

This argument can be taken too far; as Kevin Rudd has pointed out, Marxism remains an important part of Xi’s economic policy framework—along with Leninism and nationalism.

But despite a generally fair account of China’s problems and pathologies, Breakneck is, at heart, a book about potential military conflict—even as it purports to be a book about political-economic and, to some degree, cultural differences. Wang warns of the possibility of a hot conflict between China and the United States. “A lot of manufacturing and food capacity is a useful thing to have,” Wang writes of Xi’s agricultural policy, “if there is another pandemic—or a war.”

Wang is, of course, right that the U.S.-China relationship is a high-stakes issue that should interest the entire world: “A paramount question of our times is whether hostility between China and the United States can stay at a manageable simmer.” A military conflict between the world’s first and second economic superpowers would be a dire event with global consequences; the two powers would “devastate not only each other but also the world.” Discussing U.S.-China political economy is, therefore, not an intellectual exercise.

What makes this book unique is its disavowed hawkishness with diagonal characteristics. This is not some bellicose work of China-bashing: its criticisms are often sharp and justified. Moreover, it wears its militarism lightly: its policy implications seem, by the end, natural, preparing readers for confrontation while sounding bipartisan: “The two superpowers are uneasily circling each other, reorienting their economies and national security apparatuses to prepare for conflict.”

And yet Wang ignores the fact that the U.S. has spent $4.4 trillion on defense between 2020 and 2024 alone. Under Trump 2.0, the Pentagon’s budget will have risen to about $1 trillion a year. That kind of money gets a lot of engineering done, lawyers notwithstanding. (Wang acknowledges the trillion-dollar budget but claims, without much elaboration, that the “military-industrial complex looks challenged.”) Wang’s worries about American decline overlook the fact that the U.S. remains—and will remain for the foreseeable future—the world’s leading military superpower. Downplaying American military power and production, especially defense production, seems odd—redolent of Pete Hegseth’s sermonizing about the need to create a “warrior ethos,” as if a trillion-dollar fighting force meant nothing.

Its disavowals allow Breakneck to function all the more effectively to advocate for the United States to “build,” not with the essentially civilian purpose of raising living standards—Klein and Thompson’s liberal-centrist aim—but to bolster geopolitical power. In this respect, Wang’s work merges, in multiple ways, with the Trump 2.0 agenda, though without the author having to acknowledge as much. Wang instead gets to play the role of the coolly analytic moderate, not quite concealing the security story but not making it the book’s centerpiece either.

So what would an Abundance–Breakneck part-alternative, part-synthesis look like? Abundance doesn’t go far enough in its progressivism, but at least it keeps societal well-being in focus. Against Breakneck’s narrow nationalism and securitized tenor, collective welfare and mutually beneficial development should be centered. That will be difficult given the nature of the regimes currently involved—on both sides. But simply adding more production power to a state with a trillion-dollar military is not in itself a pathway to stability.

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Despite its critical acclaim, One Battle After Another is a dangerously mistimed movie for the left. Its first thirty minutes read like a MAGA fantasy, or nightmare, about the “antifa” left: In rapid succession, we see violence, bombings, and a deadly bank robbery carried out by a shadowy activist group calling itself the French 75—Thomas Pynchon’s parallel-universe version of the real-world, early-1970s Weathermen. Parts of the French 75’s activism is about breaking migrants out of camps, but other parts seem anarchic and aimless—as if Paul Thomas Anderson set out to provide cinematic validation for Trump’s confabulations about “radical left lunatics.” The collision between real-world MAGA talking points, on the one hand, and the film’s portrayal of violence is disconcerting, Leonardo DiCaprio’s whooping “Viva la revolución” while his band of fellow merry pranksters, led by the berserk Perfidia Beverly Hills, assassinate a security guard. The film’s essential cartoonishness doesn’t keep One Battle from handing the MAGA movement a broad brush to tar the left as amoral worshippers of lawlessness and disorder.

Why would Hollywood lean into a fetishistic, aestheticizing portrayal of far-leftist activism at a time when progressives’ sobriety, humanity, and peaceful resourcefulness should be foregrounded? The fact that liberal critics and audiences seem to have largely embraced One Battle only makes matters worse. Of course, $130 million movies take a long time to produce, and One Battle was likely set in motion when Trump was still in the wilderness, seemingly destined to remain a one-term president. One Battle would have played better against a second-term Biden or Harris presidency.

But regardless of circumstances, Anderson seems particularly unsuited to making a politically charged semi-blockbuster in this moment: He appears blissfully unaware of the film’s political context or its possible extra-cinematic effects beyond movie theaters. Fox News could run clips of One Battle’s first half-hour for the next six months and deepen Trump’s base; in fact, its opinion columnists are already hard at work, opining about the film’s “anti-America” qualities. There’s little more dangerous in the world of culture than an essentially ironic filmmaker—harmlessly entertaining in quieter times—working with dated material who ventures into hotter political waters without recognizing how the times are changing. Lopping off the first act, at least, would have been a smart move.

Still, there are genuinely entertaining moments as well. In the film, the Christmas Adventurers Club, a hybrid Skull and Bones–Church of Scientology-style fraternity, plays an outsize role: Members greet each other with a “Merry Christmas” in the middle of summer, not to mention comical salutes of “All hail Saint Nick.” The lodge wields enormous power and, chillingly, doesn’t hesitate to engage in murderous, white-supremacist “cleansing” operations. But while the primary antagonist of the movie, Steven J. Lockjaw, harkens back to the cigar-chomping colonels of Vietnam War movies, his caricatural persona verges on self-parody. Loading his person with the dominant politics of the movie universe also makes for a contrived plot resolution: Spoiler alert, with Lockjaw out of the picture, our fugitive hero is, for some inexplicable reason, free to return home.

Meanwhile, the portrayal of the underground railroad-man and martial-arts instructor Sergio St. Carlos, played to great effect by Benicio Del Toro, is surprisingly moving: His practical activism, providing shelter and comfort to hundreds of undocumented migrants, seems endlessly more valuable than the aimless revolutionism of the French 75—a point the movie doesn’t stop to ponder: St. Carlos’s role is to move things along and help “Ghetto Pat” (a symptomatically dated, offensive moniker), played by Leonardo DiCaprio, escape the authorities’ fascist machinations. DiCaprio/Pat, now nearly twenty years after the violence of the film’s opening sequences, plays a disheveled, lovable, yet frustrating, Dude-like character willing to risk it all to save his daughter.

The core problem with One Battle After Another is that it’s a fish out of water: a postmodern caper dropped into the brutal return of modernist politics, including fascism authoritarianism; a story emerging from the Pax Americana of the early ‘90s and (therefore) disconnected from the seething nativist nationalism of the 2020s. An exceptionally dangerous historical conjuncture is not the best time for picaresque postmodernism. Even esteemed film directors need to know what it is they are doing in the world as it currently is.

Of course, art shouldn’t be made to conform to the antipathies of fascists. That would be handing the Bannons and Millers of the world too big a cultural stick. But the left is in the midst of a uniquely intense strategic cultural–political battle with the right—and the far right is largely winning. While Hollywood might think it is doing the left a favor by making films like One Battle, if anything, the opposite seems true. This doesn’t mean that we should joylessly demand that art conform to ideology or to the strategic imperatives of the moment. But it does mean looking beyond the cultural industry’s immediate horizon—and weighing the possible cultural–political effects of the commodities the industry puts to market. Even as Hollywood congratulates itself, it hands the right a stick to be beaten with.

Much of the early media coverage of Kamala Harris’s campaign-trail memoir, 107 Days, was essentially unfair. Political commentators and media outlets portrayed her book as divisive, splitting the Democratic camp at a time when unity against Trump 2.0 was the top priority. USA Today reported that 107 Days was filled with “score-settling.” Politico claimed Harris’s book constituted an “ambush of fellow Democrats” because—shockingly!—Harris “used her new memoir to speak her mind”; four days later, the outlet wrote, Harris was desperately trying to “unburn the bridges.” The Hill adopted a similar line, but outsourced the task of giving voice to it to Democratic strategists said to be “frustrated” with Harris over a book intent on “picking fights and causing divisions at the worst possible time for the party.”

So what were these horribly divisive, bridge-burning, mind-speaking truths?

• Harris writes that California governor Gavin Newsom never returned her call after inquiries were made about his availability as VP: “Hiking. Will call back.” Harris relays her own laconic parenthetical remark: “He never did.”

• Harris notes her concerns about Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro’s ability to “settle for a role as number two”—Shapiro, too, had been tapped as a potential VP candidate—“and that it would wear on our partnership.”

• Harris criticizes Biden’s inner circle—not Biden himself—for failing to be as maximally supportive of her as she believed they could have been: “Their thinking was zero-sum: If she’s shining, he’s dimmed. None of them grasped that if I did well, he did well.”

• Harris doesn’t mince words about Biden’s infamous debate performance though claims she had no foreknowledge of his condition: “I had never, in three and a half years at the White House, in the Oval Office or the Situation Room, witnessed anything remotely like the level of confusion, incoherence, and debility we saw on the debate stage.”

• Harris criticizes Tim Walz’s first on-stage appearance with her, when Walz clasped Harris’s hand in an “enthusiastic victory gesture,” but forgot to account for their height difference: “It felt like I was dangling from a jungle gym while wearing a suit.”

• Harris laments Walz’s vice-presidential debate with J.D. Vance, when Walz seemed taken in by Vance’s faux-folksy demeanor: “When Tim fell for it and started nodding and smiling … I told the television screen: ‘You’re not there to make friends with the guy who is attacking your running mate.’”

But none of these observations are illegitimate; in fact, all of them seem like perfectly sensible things to write about in a campaign postmortem. They’re Harris’s truth, as she sees it, about how the campaign went—and they are not even particularly damning truths. Media portrayals of Harris as a “disloyal divider” seem driven more by the kinds of discrimination faced by women, and Black women in particular, in positions of power.

Harris herself would probably be the first to recognize it. “As the first woman, or Black woman, in every office I have run for, except the Senate, where I was the second,” she writes at one point, “racism and sexism have always been present.”

The Tragedy of 107 Days

107 Days is an oddly riveting book despite the fact that we all know how it ends. The story of how we get there is well-paced. Even if the day-by-day diary structure does grow a bit stale by the end, suspense derives from observing a tragic arc unfold: a heroic protagonist filled with reasonable hope and a surprisingly theological righteousness—progressive pastors and soulful prayer abound here—is defeated by a malignant foe, Trump; his victory sparks the unmaking of the liberal order and the rise of an aggressively authoritarian nationalism. 107 Days is high-stakes tragedy.

And there is much to commend its protagonist in this book. Harris shows real stamina, endurance, and a fine-tuned sense of humor. She appears a savvy political operator, a kind of political anthropologist of Washington, D.C. (“I know how this town works”), where information is a prime commodity: “What you know and what you’re prepared to trade are the keys to power.” Devastating, too, and pointedly accurate, are Harris’s portrayals of the many ways in which Trump remains the most temperamentally unfit person ever to seek the U.S. presidency—from his refusal to even look at Harris during their televised debate, to pretending not to know how to pronounce her name (“Ka-mar-la, sometimes referred to as Kar-ma-la, you know, she’s got about nine different ways of pronouncing the name,” he claims, baselessly). And much more.

Harris is deeply critical, too, of Elon Musk’s role in the election. She notes that X became a powerful MAGA propaganda vehicle under Musk’s ownership, becoming his “personal megaphone for boosting Trump and denigrating me.” Unsurprisingly, Joe Rogan also comes off as deeply unreasonable, inventing excuses not to platform Harris on his podcast. Harris understands well the complex web of powerful media and tech players that helped propel Trump back into the White House.

Harris comes across as a politician without illusions with a canny knack for dissecting realities. And if her prosecutorial background brought, by her own admission, an exaggerated care for preparation and factuality (“I have been conditioned by my career to weigh my every word”)—probably not an advantage when facing someone as slippery as Trump—Harris’s earnestness feels refreshing.

Gaza, a Missing Reckoning

But what hasn’t Harris learned from the failure of those 107 fateful days? In a word: Gaza. Israel’s genocide was perpetrated with weapons and political cover supplied in large part by the Biden administration. But for such a defining, gruesome issue, Harris shows a remarkable lack of introspection or awareness, completely out of character with her otherwise shrewd political persona.

Harris acknowledges that Biden’s popularity tanked not just over his “age issue,” as she delicately phrases it, but his “perceived blank check to Benjamin Netanyahu in Gaza.” But this wasn’t just a ”perceived” blank check: it was very much a real permission and facilitation. The very same White House administration that Harris was a part of offered the military, fiscal, and symbolic means for Netanyahu’s forces to kill tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians.

Harris does criticize Biden for his Gaza policy and claims she “pleaded with Joe” to “extend the same empathy he showed to the suffering of Ukrainians to the suffering of innocent Gazan civilians. But he couldn’t do it: while he could passionately state, ‘I am a Zionist,’ his remarks about innocent Palestinians came off as inadequate and forced.”

But then why, when asked what she would have done differently from Biden did she offer the infamous reply that “there is not a thing that comes to mind”? Even with the benefit of hindsight, Harris seems puzzled by her own remark. She berates herself, in stilted prose (“Why. Didn’t. I. Separate. Myself. From. Joe. Biden?”), but also claims she had “no idea” that she’d “just pulled the pin on a hand grenade” when she failed to distance herself from Biden during her appearance on the TV show The View, a mere month before the election.

Instead, when Harris recounts witnessing pro-Palestinian protesters at one of her rallies, her analysis seems oddly disconnected from how political motivations work: “I wished they would understand that sitting out the election or voting for a third candidate would elect Trump and kill any effort for a just peace, any hope for a two-state solution.” But that’s just not how strongly motivated, single-issue voters operate. Thousands of voters cared deeply about Gaza and wanted their preferred candidate to do the same.

On the whole, one gets the sense that Harris still hasn’t dealt adequately with Gaza. The Democrats lost Michigan by more than 80,000 votes. Harris hardly recognizes that a near-total identification with Biden’s Gaza policy in the eyes of many voters cost the Democratic Party dearly—not just among Arab Americans and Muslim Americans, but among leftist voters in general, especially young progressives. These groups were demobilized by Democratic complicity—not perceived complicity, but real, tangible, bloody complicity—in the attempted destruction of a people.

This isn’t just empty speculation. It’s supported by hard polling data. As an Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU) report based on YouGov data noted earlier this year, nearly 30 percent of people who reported voting for Biden in 2020 but didn’t vote for Harris in 2024 said that “’ending Israel’s violence in Gaza’ was the top issue affecting their vote choice.” Gaza loomed much larger in the minds of many American voters than the Democratic establishment was willing to recognize or act upon. Even after Biden passed the torch to Harris, there was no substantive course correction on Gaza, no meaningful “daylight” between them—despite a few well-timed remarks about the suffering of Gaza’s civilian population. It’s a key reason why Donald Trump now occupies the White House for the second time.

Defending Unabashed Progressivism

Less than a month before the election, Harris recounts a rehearsed debating line: “If I’m president I would appoint a Republican to my cabinet.” The infamous Liz Cheney maneuver was an attempt to curry favor with moderate Republicans, especially suburban women dismayed or repulsed by Trump. But centrist Democrats surely underestimated the vote-depressing effects of this rightward shuffle on their progressive constituencies (recall that nearly 90 million people didn’t vote—by far the largest party). What Democratic strategist had the bright idea of bringing onto the campaign Liz Cheney, whose father, Dick Cheney, was one of the principal architects of the Iraq War, in the midst of another violent Middle Eastern bloodletting from which the Harris campaign hadn’t sufficiently distanced itself? It was poor political craftsmanship, but also a failure of nerve—a lack of confidence that principled progressivism could win on its own terms.

The campaign’s waning resolve was also evident in Harris’s decision to select Walz for vice-presidential running mate over Pete Buttigieg, despite Harris’s preference for the latter. Heartbreakingly, Harris writes that Buttigieg “would have been an ideal partner—if I were a straight white man. But we were already asking a lot of America. … Part of me wanted to say, Screw it, let’s just do it. But knowing what was at stake, it was too big of a risk.” In hindsight, this seems like a mistake. Giving in to bigots and reactionaries only whets their appetite for further concessions. Liberals must defend an unabashed progressivism. Buttigieg is no radical, but his candidacy would have sent a message.

107 Days is light on policy but does suggest Harris lacked the economic-populist instincts—beyond the rhetoric and policy proposals—that would have stood the best chance of defeating Trump’s right-wing nationalist populism. Harris never managed to represent herself as a bona fide economic populist, despite a number of policy proposals moving in that direction.

Most tragedies and disasters are overdetermined: more factors are available than are needed to account for the final outcome. The 2024 U.S. presidential election is the most momentous election in recent memory. We need to study and scrutinize it. 107 Days is an important source in that effort. A critical reading suggests that Harris lost because of inaction on Gaza, a failure of resolve, and a diluted economic vision, at a time when voters demanded bigger, bolder action. Combine this with the titular short run (a product of Biden’s pride), as well as the forces stacked up on the other side, including the communicative power of the world’s wealthiest tech oligarch, and Trump 2.0 begins to look like an inevitability.

The overarching political lesson I draw from 107 Days is that the center alone cannot hold: it shouldn’t be steering the ship or calling the shots on its own. Rolling back authoritarian populism, national conservatism, fascism, or whatever you want to call it—not just in the United States but around the world—will take broad center-left coalitions. But the stress must be placed on the left, not the center. More Mamdani, less Harris, if you will.

Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson (2025). Abundance: How We Build a Better Future. Avid Reader Press.

One way of thinking about Abundance might be to see it as a blueprint for a Democratic victory in 2028. Structured around five chapters, Klein and Thompson want to teach liberals how to grow, build, govern, invent, and deploy. At the core of their vision is the idea that the state needs to take on a more active role in helping build green energy or basic infrastructure and funding daring new scientific research.

There’s nothing particularly controversial about this. The economist Mariana Mazzucato showed in her 2013 book, The Entrepreneurial State, how crucial government action is to forging dynamic, vibrant economies. (Klein and Thompson cite her work.) And there are genuinely sound ideas on display in Abundance: we do need more green energy, solar panels, high-density housing, high-speed rail, and spending on basic science that isn’t stifled by funding agencies. But is the vision bold enough to bring us to a true state of abundance? And can it puncture MAGA’s grip on power—or in a broader, global context, deflect the rise of the far right?

One is a question of the radicalism of the societal vision being proposed, the other a question of political strategy. What is ultimately dissatisfying about Abundance is that it neither seems utopian enough to live up to its titular promise, nor does it seem sufficiently responsive or well-timed enough to forge a new politics of the left capable of ejecting fascists from power.

Nothing New—and Not So Relevant

Despite its piecemeal merits, it is tempting to say that Abundance is a book “about nothing,” to borrow a phrase from Seinfeld, in two very specific senses.

First, it’s about nothing new: as the authors themselves admit, Biden adopted much of the industrial-policy ethos that the authors spend a whole book advocating for. Klein and Thompson want a “Liberalism That Builds,” with government taking a more proactive role in supply-side interventions, either getting out of the way of market actors or rolling up its own sleeves for more direct involvement—in everything from building high-speed rail or microchip foundries to high-density housing and solar panel arrays.

But who needs to hear this? Certainly not centrist Democrats. As the authors admit, the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Act were motivated by this very same pro-“build” ethos. That Biden’s policies “represent a break with recent decades of American politics is undeniable,” they write. So who needs Abundance? “This book has offered a critique of the ways that liberals have governed and thought over the past fifty years,” the authors write in their conclusion—which is hardly politically apposite. What purpose is served by such a backward-looking prospectus? The authors rail against an orthodoxy—a version of the neoliberalism that extended from Reagan and the Bushes through Clinton to Obama, evolving along the way—that already seems passé.

Second, and relatedly, this is a book about nothing much of relevance to this political moment, which is, of course, dominated by Trump’s increasingly assertive fascist authoritarianism. It is a flaw of centrist liberalism that one could gaze out over the American social landscape of the first half of the 2020s and think that the core political problem facing progressives is one of overregulation. Klein and Thompson also offer no meaningful analysis of the other side, Trump’s MAGA movement. How do you beat the authoritarian nativism, the strategically deployed right-wing Christian nationalism, the creeping fascism? Surely not with bureaucratic downsizing—if anything, that’s part of the other side’s playbook.

This might seem to be a book for a Democratic presidency that never came to fruition. For Klein and Thompson’s message to truly have landed, one might think, Harris—or a Democratic contender like her—would have had to win in November 2024. But even then, its message would have been off-kilter. If anything, Abundance should have been written ten or fifteen years ago—pre-Trump 1.0 and, just as importantly, pre-Biden, whose political-economic sensibilities were, as Klein and Thompson note, transformed both by Trump’s first-term right-wing economic populism and, just as importantly, Bernie Sanders’ left-wing economic populism. The center of the Democratic Party has long since caught on to the core ideas defended here as if they were a new and dangerous heterodox creed.

In short, the book suffers from poor timing, both because of Democrats’ own ideological shifts, and the fraught politics it landed in. Appearing in March 2025, just as Musk’s DOGE army was rampaging through the U.S. federal government, Klein and Thompson were promoting a book that pushes for deregulation, especially of environmental protections and municipal zoning. In the very same moment that Musk and his cronies were busy tearing it all down, Klein and Thompson seemed to hammer away at the kinds of protections that liberals helped forge over multiple decades. Now, the authors might claim that Trump, Musk, and co. are more intent on destroying than building—but the convergences are disconcerting. When they take to task the Biden-era CHIPS Act’s funding for semiconductor foundries for asking how prospective projects “would include minority-, veteran- and female-owned businesses . . . in their supply chain,” Klein and Thompson’s argument resonates uncomfortably with the Trump administration’s attacks on DEI policies.

Abundance without Abundance

Klein and Thompson’s book has been pitched to the reading public as something that it is not: a blueprint for a (realistic) utopian, or even, we might say, cornucopian capitalism, overflowing with prosperity for all. Its glossy cover illustration envisions a clean, green, high-tech society, perched between urban high modernity and the demands of natural ecology; its introductory vignette, “Beyond scarcity,” sketches the kind of future society the authors want their readers to inhabit—but it feels more like Denmark of today than, say, Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia. It’s hardly a model for how to counteract far-right resurgence, deal with impending climate catastrophe or tamp down global social inequalities. The authors likely realize the oversold utopian dimension of their book—poorly matched by its contents—which is why they give a nod to Aaron Bastani’s (2019) Fully Automated Luxury Communism, though without deeper engagement with its closer attention to economic welfare, planning, and redistribution.

We might consider what Klein and Thompson omit from their vision. They seem unconcerned about proposals for a shorter working day or working week. They are uninterested in even modest redistributions of income and wealth or ideas like Universal Basic Income. There’s effectively nothing about free public healthcare here, in a country wracked by the extreme commodification of healthcare and soaring levels of medical debt; and nothing about student loan forgiveness or shoring up free higher education. The authors are unfazed by capitalism’s basic ecological problem, its infinite growth imperative—that is, the fact that market actors are constantly required to grow, despite clear planetary constraints; instead, we get a snide remark about “the degrowther movement,” and the need to avoid “regress,” betraying a lack of understanding of this intellectual movement’s true concerns.

What we get instead are tweaks around the margins—technological fixes like carbon removal—alongside repackaged Biden-era political-economic orthodoxies, rebranded as a bold new vision—and a hope that everything can go on as before, with minor adjustments and no real need for systemic change.

In fact, what Klein and Thompson propose isn’t really abundance at all: it’s capitalism with a human face—increasingly deregulated, though encapsulated by a moderately more activist state. Writing a book about how to “build a better future” in the United States in the first half of the 2020s without addressing the need for economic redistribution or free public healthcare seems injudicious.

At its core, Abundance might even be said to be a case of conceptual co-optation: the idea of abundance, more properly the preserve of radical progressives, is dragged rightward, to be held at center-ground. But this is political turf that seems to belong to democratic socialists—or social democrats—like Warren, Sanders, and Mamdani. It feels obvious that elevating politicians of their stripe is the left’s only real hope of fending off a MAGA victory in 2028. Ideally, a big-tent center-left could soak up the functional parts of Abundance worth keeping, while being propelled by the energy, enthusiasm, and credibility of real progressives, more attuned to the welfare needs and interests of ordinary people—and with bigger, bolder visions. But Abundance-style centrism alone? That won’t carry the day.

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With less than two weeks to go, some polling indicates the red-green bloc may secure a majority in the Storting. But it remains a tight race. August polling averages, for instance, show the red-green coalition with 85 mandates, a narrow majority, against the right-wing bloc’s 84 mandates.

And this is assuming all parties on the red-green side manage to come to an agreement. One local member of the traditionally red-green-supporting Centre Party recently argued that the party should switch allegiances, even though similar pleas from the Conservatives were rejected by the Centre Party’s leader earlier this year. The smaller parties on both sides of the political spectrum will also play a pivotal role—in Norway, parties that clear a 4 percent threshold can compete for bonus seats in parliament. There’s a lot at stake whether the Green Party, Christian Democratic Party, and Liberal Party manage to clear the hurdle, as they could make or break their respective side’s majority.

The Progress Party has also made significant gains since the previous parliamentary elections in 2021; some of their gains have been offset by the Conservative Party’s waning popularity. Still, the Progress Party’s views on immigration have in many ways set the tone and tenor for the entire election.

Despite some positive recent polls suggesting a red-green majority is within reach, then, the end result is far from certain. The race is neck-and-neck. As ever, the final outcome will be determined by the voters, but also a good deal of political horse-trading.

The Right’s Weaponization of Immigration and Crime

The right has been remarkably successful at taking charge of the public conversation and drilling down into two key themes: immigration and crime.

Throughout the election season, the Conservative Party has run social media ads advocating “tightening immigration” and, borrowing from the populist right’s playbook, has pushed a mock-ironic anti-immigration slogan: “No slogans. Just less immigration.”

The Progress Party in particular has worked hard to link crime and immigration in the public mind, and it has been remarkably successful at drawing the discourse in its preferred direction.

For a full year leading up to the election, the Progress Party’s leader, Sylvi Listhaug, has hammered on her party’s signature theme: opposition to immigration. “If immigration is not dramatically slowed down now,” she said in November, “we risk that in a few years we will not be able to afford to take care of our own citizens.” Listhaug—a kind of Nordicized Trump or Meloni of the North—has worked indefatigably to portray crime as a widespread and growing social problem, rooted in immigration and centered on young, urban (ethnic-minority) men.

The fact that both the Progress Party and the Conservative Party have been able to do so, almost unimpeded, is peculiar, given the fact that Norway remains one of the safest countries in the world. If anything, immigration is in many ways the solution to some of Norway’s problems, including a looming demographic crisis—an aging population amidst declining birthrates—and potential labor shortages, especially in the country’s welfare state.

The manufactured nature of the crime issue is only compounded by the fact that Norway’s overall crime rate has declined steadily over the last few decades. Since the early 2000s, the rate of police-reported crimes (shown below) has dropped by nearly a third from over 90 crimes per 1,000 inhabitants to just above 60 crimes per 1,000 by 2024. There are categories of crime that are an exception, such as a moderate uptick in police-reported violence—from 6.9 cases per 1,000 in 2003 to 8.2 cases in 2024—but crime in general is trending downward, and the slight uptick in specific categories hardly warrants the kind of bombastic societal discourse the Norwegian right has been pushing.

Interestingly, this great Norwegian crime decline has coincided with a significant expansion in immigration. Some may be surprised to learn that Norway has become a diverse, multicultural society. The idea of a nation of blonde, blue-eyed Vikings is a tourist stereotype—or an ethnonationalist fantasy cultivated by the far right. In the capital, Oslo, immigrants and their descendants make up more than a third of the population; in the country as a whole, these groups make up more than 20 percent of the population. Immigrants have enriched Norway.

But if immigration has gone up while crime has fallen, the supposedly tight connection between crime and immigration that the Norwegian right insists upon is clearly a misrepresentation of macro trends. As one Norwegian sociologist observed earlier this year, “In 2023, almost 100,000 fewer crimes were reported [in Norway] than in 2003, a reduction of 22 percent. During the same period, the number of immigrants and Norwegian-born people with an immigrant background increased by 227 percent.” It’s an unpleasant fact that right-wing politicians are rarely, if ever, forced to confront: how do they make sense of the fact that Norway has become an increasingly diverse society—while crime has declined over the long run?

One potent measure of how safe Norway remains can be found in the country’s homicide statistics. The absolute number of homicides has remained stable since the 1990s, hovering at around 30-40 victims per year; in the same period, the population grew, meaning that the per-capita homicide rate in reality declined over the period. Norway’s homicide level is far lower than that of the United States, England, and even neighboring Sweden.

As the chart above shows, the only exception to this trend lies in a single year, 2011, when a right-wing extremist, Anders Behring Breivik—a one-time member of the Progress Party—killed 77 people, including 69 people at a progressive youth summer camp outside Oslo, and a further eight individuals in a bombing of government buildings in downtown Oslo. With the exception of the 22 July, 2011 attacks, perpetrated by an Islamophobic, white-supremacist mass murderer, Norway has been remarkably successful in ensuring public safety and relatively low levels of crime.

Of course, when the right speaks of threats to public safety, they generally mean street crimes—such as muggings and robberies—or other disruptions of public order. The Norwegian right also tries to tap into broader feelings of uncertainty and insecurity, often related to ethnocultural anxieties about the disruption of traditional folkways.

This is not to minimize the impact that crimes, or the threat of crime, can have on people’s welfare. But the right-wing framing of crime has been disproportionate to its true incidence—and it has clearly been ethnicized, aimed at activating the basest nativist sentiments in the population.

It’s hardly surprising that Norway has remained a safe, thriving, and prosperous country: its Switzerland-like levels of oil-fueled wealth, combined with plentiful government spending on social security and public welfare, have allowed many to enjoy a sound living standard. It would be peculiar if such a prosperous country were to engender high levels of social pathology.

That makes the right’s narrative all the more unreal and fantastical. Unlike in other countries, where “native” locals may feel their jobs are being “taken” by immigrant arrivals, there is no evidence that immigration is causing economic dislocation in Norway. Quite the contrary: immigrants often fill positions for which there are no takers.

The Death of Tamima

With just over two weeks until the election, Norwegians were once again reminded of the threat of right-wing extremism to public safety. A 34-year-old Ethiopian-Norwegian social worker, Tamima Nibras Juhar, was murdered in her Oslo workplace, a child welfare institution, by a young man with far-right views.

While the public condemnation of the murder was swift, most commentators and politicians failed, at least in the initial aftermath, to situate it in its proper sociological context: increasingly virulent anti-immigrant rhetoric from right-wing politicians, combined with the far right’s growing self-assertiveness.

A week prior to the attack, a radical far-right party, the Norway Democrats (ND), had organized a so-called “remigration conference”—one of the most high-profile events for far-right activists the country had seen in years. Among the participants were the German Alternative für Deutschland politician Lena Kotré and the French far-right ideologue Renaud Camus, originator of the white-nationalist, conspiratorial notion of a “Great Replacement.”

The week following, a former (respected) correspondent for Norway’s public broadcasting corporation, Anders Magnus, penned an op-ed in the newspaper Aftenposten claiming that “the welfare state [is] threatened, primarily due to immigration from clan-based, Islamic countries in the Middle East, Africa and Asia”—an unsubstantiated and deeply Islamophobic claim.

More broadly, both the Progress Party and Conservative Party had repeatedly beat the drums of nativism—against immigrants.

The murder of Tamima brought home what was really at stake this election season in Norway: the imperative need to protect an increasingly diverse, high-functioning society threatened by racism, xenophobia, and nativism. This toxic triad had claimed 77 lives on July 22, 2011, and another life just a little over two weeks before the election. How many more lives would be lost before Norwegians realized that immigration wasn’t the threat, but rather those seeking to cultivate fear and hatred of diversity?

Neoliberalism, Fascism, Climate Change—and Gaza

Any major election will of course cover a range of additional issues.

One might have expected the election to hinge on a few of the key political questions of our time—say, the threat of fascism and destabilization spreading from Trump’s White House to Europe at large, with offshoots of growing far-right sentiment seen in Germany’s rising AfD and France’s National Rally, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, or—in Norway’s next-door neighbor—the Sweden Democrats. Or, after an unusually sweltering Nordic summer, one might have expected more attention to the growing threat of catastrophic climate change, with an urgent need to decarbonize an economy heavily reliant on fossil fuel exports.

Neoliberalism—along with its proponents and discontents—has not been entirely absent. The Conservatives and Liberals have been focused on the wealth tax, which they claim forces rich Norwegian business owners to drain their companies of capital to pay their tax bill. The left has repeatedly pointed out the exaggerations and outright false reporting on the issue. The Red Party has attacked the growing prevalence of private health insurance in a country that has prided itself on its public healthcare system. The Socialist Left Party has focused on rising food prices and widening social inequalities.

On the threat of the far right, and Trump more specifically, Norway’s Labour government has—like most of Europe—found itself taking a “pragmatic” stance. The government has drawn on the political capital of former NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, brought into government as Minister of Finance earlier this year—to secure (seemingly) a modicum of concessions from Trump 2.0 on trade and tariffs.

But across the party landscape, with the exception of the radical left, there has been disconcertingly little willingness to draw a connecting line between Trump’s authoritarianism and outright fascism to analogous ideological tendencies at home—or in Europe, more broadly.

On climate change, too, the election has been decidedly muted: unimpeded oil and natural gas exports are widely seen as a necessary contribution to European energy independence. In one telling moment earlier this month, the Progress Party’s Listhaug said the climate activist Greta Thunberg, who had been protesting against the Norwegian oil industry, “should be deported from the country” —an echo of Trump’s MAGA rhetoric.

At one point, the election looked set to become about Gaza. Earlier in the summer, a Norwegian group of academics calling itself Historians for Palestine released a report detailing the country’s significant investments in Israeli companies—including companies linked to occupation and genocide—through Norway’s $2 trillion “Oil Fund,” the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund. The report was resoundingly ignored.

But it wasn’t until mid-August when Aftenposten covered some of the same material on its front page that the story exploded. The fund, it turned out, had outsourced some of its investment decisions to several Israeli portfolio managers, some with links to the Netanyahu government. The Labour Party-led government swung into action, selling off a sizable part of its Israel-linked holdings. Heading off a bloodletting to the left by appearing resolute on Israeli investments, and a hemorrhaging to the right by maintaining its pro-business credentials, the Labour Party government weathered the storm, mere weeks before the election, by striking a balance between ethical claims and studied financial neutrality.

A High-Stakes Election

Many Norwegians still think of Norway as a society and country somehow set apart from the rest of the world: exceptionalism remains a powerful cultural idea. As one prime minister put it in the 1990s, “It’s typically Norwegian to be good”—a remarkably conceited statement.

Unfortunately, at the moment, there’s nothing exceptional about Norway’s politics. Across Europe, the right is on the rise. Nativism is a key rallying point. But the Norwegian right isn’t just threatening immigrants and minorities. It’s pushing along a wide front, from trying to roll back a key wealth tax to blocking the green transition. The Progress Party’s partners on the right increasingly look like willing dupes who may help bring to power a political force akin to Meloni, Trump, and Farage. That would be a disaster for Norway. Only a strong center-left coalition stands in the way of this becoming a reality. The stakes are high, and the race will be close.

Some years ago, I was conducting research on the history of imprisonment in the Scandinavian countries, which later came to form part of my doctoral dissertation. One strand of this research took me to the Swedish National Archives in Stockholm where I came upon a series of boxes the containing the files of Karl Schlyter, Sweden’s progressive minister of justice in the mid-1930s. Schlyter had been something of a firebrand social democrat. His professional pedigree was impeccable, but unlike most bourgeois jurists, he had used his legal capital in service of a progressive reform of law and punishment—as seen in his advocacy for “emptying the prisons,” a radical stance for a highly placed former civil servant, judge, and then Minister of Justice.

In Schlyter’s files, I came across a letter from Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish jurist who famously coined the term genocide. The letter is postmarked July 1945, mere months after the Allies’ victory over Nazism and fascism in Europe. Lemkin recounts that he is in the process of firming up the concept of genocide, a term he had first developed in his 1944 book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe:

By ‘genocide’ we mean the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group. […] Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves.

In his 1945 letter, meanwhile, Lemkin writes, “I coined the word genocide from the greek genos - race, tribe” and the “Latin suffix ‘cide’ analogously to homicide, fratricide.” He writes that he would like to “propose to create from genocide a delictum iuris gentium,” or violation of international law. In this letter, we find Lemkin in the midst of his efforts to gain recognition for this still-nascent term.

Of course, the letter is not some grand juridical or theoretical statement, but a piece of correspondence between colleagues whose interactions had been interrupted by war. Schlyter had helped bring Lemkin to Stockholm in 1940; it was Schlyter who, “through his invitation and guarantee that Lemkin would not burden Swedish society financially, made it possible for Lemkin to obtain a visa and entry,” as a Swedish legal scholar noted in a 2016 essay. “But even in neutral Sweden, Lemkin did not feel safe,” another legal historian writes, and Lemkin left for the United States the next year, having secured a position at Duke University.

There is a kind of interwar nostalgia in Lemkin’s letter (“Coming back to old days and old friends…”), and he reminisces about the Bureau International pour l'unification du droit penal, an organization working for penal reform whose ambitions had been shattered by the rise of fascism, Nazism, and global war. He wonders whether genocide as legal concept will gain ground through the findings of the postwar Nuremberg Tribunal. In particular, Lemkin hopes that the French judge Donnediue de Vabres “will support the conception of genocide” and thinks that “[i]f the court accepts genocide as a charge it would be easier later to put it through an international treaty.”

In the event, the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg did use the “term ‘genocide’ to describe the fate of Jews and others under Nazi rule but did not charge the defendants with it as a specific crime.” It was not until December 9, 1948 that the United Nations established the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

Below is a transcription and facsimile of Lemkin’s letter. As we consider the horrors of genocide in our own times, including the ongoing genocide in Gaza, let us turn to the historical moment in which the term was on the cusp of coming into being as a realizable legal notion. The historical genesis of the concept, now more or less taken for granted —though still contested in applicability by some actors—reminds us of that essential fact about the law, and perhaps especially international law: that it is a field of struggle over the meaning of social and historical reality, including crimes of the gravest nature. Lemkin himself was a Holocaust survivor: “Only his brother, his brother’s wife and their two children survived the war years. At least 49 other family members perished.” If we live in a world that recognizes the legal category of genocide, it is thanks in large measure to the efforts of one scholar—and survivor—of those very crimes.

[Letter from Raphael Lemkin to Karl Schlyter]

Cumberland Hotel

Marble Arch

London W.1.

7 - 1945

Dear President Schlyter,

After my last letter to you through Professor Taylor Cole I wanted to write to you again, but somehow it so happened that I simply didn’t do it. Somehow I felt that to such a busy man like yourself I can write only when I have to communicate something of importance. Let me assure you, dear President, that I have been always thinking about you and your generous assistance to me - while I was in distress - with a feeling of deep gratitude.

I have been here [in London] since several months on an official mission for the American government and am returning soon to U.S.A. However I may come later, to Nuremberg, if I will not be kept too busy with other work. I am trying now to send you my volume Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, published by Carnegie Endowment for international peace. Chapter IX on genocide - destruction of nations - has drawn certain attention in America and England. I coined the word genocide from the greek genos - race, tribe [-] and the Latin suffix “cide” analogously to homicide, fratricide and I do propose to create from genocide a delictum iuris gentium. Of course an international treaty would be necessary for that. In time of war genocide can be punished through the instrumentality of the Hague Convention, but for time of peace one needs a treaty, specially for purposes of universal repression and eventually extradition in some cases. Since you did so much for international criminal law and international juridical collaboration I would be more than happy if I could have your approval of this idea. I wish we could have again our Bureau International pour l'unification du droit penal. It would be easier to put it through, since the internationalisation of genocide is only a further development of my proposals made in my report on terrorism at the Madrid Conference of our Bureau.

I am very glad that Donnediue de Vabres is on the court. I hope he will support the conception of genocide, while it is included in the indictment. If the court accepts genocide as a charge it would be easier later to put it through an international treaty. The support of men of your humanitarian enthusiasm and high prestige in the world, which you enjoy, would be invaluable to the making and enforcement of such a treaty.

Coming back to old days and old friends. I wanted to tell you that Professor Rappaport survived and he is now again judge on the Supreme Court of Poland in the city of Lodz. I know you will be happy to hear that.

I hope you are well and I am sure that your very important legal activities are giving you great satisfaction. I will be more than happy to hear from you either here in London or in U.S.A. My recent private address in America is:

Dorchester House, Aptm. 627, 16 Street, Washington D. C.

My official address: War Department, War Crimes Office, Washington D. C. - Munitions Bldg.

Let me tell you how happy I am about the successful developments in your splendid country, for which I guard a feeling of great admiration. And let me send you my best warm regards.

Sincerely yours

R. Lemkin

Facsimile of Lemkin’s letter to Schlyter

1945 Lemkin To Schlyter

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Dr. Victor L. Shammas is Head of Department and Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Social Work, University of Agder in Norway. He holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Oslo (2017) and has previously worked as Senior Researcher at the Work Research Institute (AFI), Oslo Metropolitan University. His work has appeared in journals such as Constellations, Punishment & Society, Critical Criminology, Capital & Class, and the British Journal of Criminology.

For his 85th birthday, former Beatle drummer Ringo Starr expressed just one wish in a video message to his followers: that everyone join together “at noon, wherever you are, all over the world” in a display of “peace and love”—his signature mantra, always accompanied by a V-shaped peace sign gesture.

Ringo’s pious wish continues to endear him to his millions of fans and followers. As one of the most beloved members of The Beatles—due in part for his apparent, perhaps deceptive, simplicity—Ringo’s seemingly naïve insistence on the continued importance of peace and love, in an age of cynicism and violence, feels oddly refreshing.

Ringo was never the sort of outspoken activist that, say, John Lennon and Yoko Ono became—famous for their strong antiwar statements at the height of the Vietnam War. Nor was he the kind of spiritually charged ponderer George Harrison turned into; after Harrison’s death in 2001, his family released a statement noting that “he often said, ‘Everything else can wait, but the search for God cannot wait, and love one another.’” And unlike Paul—was always more musically oriented, less politically engaged—Ringo’s post-Beatles career, while yielding a few gems, lacked the artistic shine of Wings or McCartney’s solo output. Instead, Ringo narrated Thomas the Tank Engine. And yet, clearly, there was something in Ringo and his bandmates’ common point of origin—The Beatles as a project extending beyond the “merely” musical, branching into an aesthetics, politics, and spirituality of transcendence—that continues to resonate in his “peace and love” message today.

As the dreams of the 1960s begin to fade from view, its ideals and slogans increasingly seeming like the fossilized remnants of a bygone age, Ringo’s commandment takes us back to some healthy, basic principles. Indeed, peace and love might even seem like perfectly decent foundations for a reconstructed progressive politics: for isn’t much of today’s politics premised on exactly the opposite—hatred and war? In Gaza, tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians have been killed by Israeli forces—more than 600 near aid delivery sites run by the infamous, ill-named Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. From the Trump administration’s sweeping arrests of thousands of law-abiding immigrants, tourists, and even U.S. citizens by ICE, to Putin’s more than three-year-long illegal war of imperial aggression against Ukraine, we seem to be moving away from—not toward—something like Ringo’s world.

There’s nothing particularly new about such horrors, of course. Just this week, the world commemorates the 30th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre, in which more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim boys and men were killed. In part, it is the continuity with the horrors of the twentieth century into the twenty-first that is shocking, the very absence of change deepening these tragedies because so many had thought the grimness of trench warfare, genocidal acts, and fascist brutality had been left behind in the previous century—with the post-9/11 wars of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya more like anachronistic remnants on this side of the new millennium, but strictly speaking belonging to the previous one.

In a world fractured and beset by war and hatred, then, why shouldn’t we—even at the risk of sounding ridiculous—embrace Ringo’s “peace and love” mantra as a guiding principle for a reconstructed politics?

The Trouble with Signifiers

The problem is, of course, that all basic terms in politics are essentially what some social theorists have called empty and even floating signifiers—that is, they are (i) liable to be filled with virtually any kind of meaning, lacking definite content in and of themselves, and (ii) their meaning can evolve, devolve, or change depending on time and context, including the alignment of powerful actors in specific historical situations.

A “signifier” is simply a sign—a word, image, symbol—that signifies; that is, it carries and transmits meaning. But a signifier is often essentially empty: it can be filled with a particular sort of meaning, and it can be rewritten, overwritten, and even erased outright by powerful actors. And it is often floating, bobbing along on the current of history, steered by dominant actors and shaped by historical contexts, and suspended within webs of related meanings.

The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu was particularly interested in this issue—which he thought of as the problem of symbolic struggles: contests over the meaning of the “symbols” that rule over, and through, us. Bourdieu was interested in the problem of symbolic power, meaning the force to shape “hearts and minds.” Naturally, there’s more to power than the symbolic dimension: we are also ruled by hard-edged, material things, like money or military force. But symbolic power is enormously important—an often “invisible” form of power more ethereal than guns, missiles, or bank accounts, but just as, if not more, efficacious. Two key forms of symbolic power—concepts and categories—capture how we think about the world (e.g., a concept like “freedom”) and how we partition the world (that is, how we categorize things, including people and social groups). Indeed, one of the key lessons of Bourdieu’s work is that we live in a world beset by symbolic power, including categories and concepts—especially as they come to filter into our minds through the educational system, the media, and the overarching workings of the state.

Take an example close at hand: the very idea of “love,” now transposed into political terms—that is, the question of what constitutes a caring, nurturing, protective politics. Perversely, the Trump administration itself frames its sweeping ICE arrests as the highest form of “love” of country and society, allegedly keeping cities and towns safe from violent, dangerous criminals: “While the press looked the other way, President Trump PROTECTED America,” as the White House recently posted on its Instagram account. The Trump administration’s social media accounts are filled with portrayals of their hateful, hate-filled policies as precisely the opposite: as care for the community, as an attempt to instill safety and security, and—as abhorrent as this must seem—a “love” for the community, often seemingly understood as the domain of an ethnicized “people,” or ethnos, rather than a generalized demos of universal subjects. One of the ways in which the Trump campaign, and later administration, has been able to generate support for its policies, has been through its carefully calibrated representational labor, portraying what are divisive, destructive, and costly (in both fiscal and human terms) policies as a kind of (loving) defense of nation, society, people, and state. In fact, like all fascisms, Trump’s fascism relies on a continuous expenditure of effort signaling the leader’s love for his people—his people, mind you, a subset of the true population—even at the expense of millions of others.

Or take the very idea of “peace”: what could possibly be wrong with wanting peace? But if we think about it for a moment, many—perhaps most—wars have been framed by their instigators as paradoxical wars for peace. Consider Israel’s war in Gaza: its stated intention is to bring about pacification, preventing the kind of horrific attacks perpetrated by Hamas on October 7th, 2023. But clearly, the war has extended far beyond its stated intent: it has long since turned into a campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocidal violence, taking the lives of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians, with plans to corral Gazans into an ever-narrowing strip of land. Israel’s “peace” in Gaza is riddled with war crimes. True peace—as most members of the international community would understand it—would require a very different approach, involving something like a UN Security Council-backed international peacekeeping force to stabilize the situation, help secure the return of hostages, stop Israel’s daily attacks on Gaza’s devastated civilian population, and facilitate humanitarian aid and reconstruction efforts. Notice that these are competing—and in many ways diametrically opposed—notions of that same word, “peace.”

The signifier, in other words, is overdetermined. All truly important political keywords have this essentially empty, fluid, or “liquid” quality about them. Consequently, they are subject to both contestation and redetermination.

“Freedom” is another striking example: a rallying cry of the French Revolution’s popular revolutionaries, it gradually morphed into the hallmark concept of Reagan- and Thatcher-style right-wing economic (neo)liberals, in which freedom came to connote the liberalization of market relations: the freedom to buy, sell, and transact in the marketplace, unimpeded by an overweening regulatory state. But the left continues to hammer away at this narrowly right-wing conception of the idea of freedom, insisting on the hollowness of market liberties without economic and social protections that enable people to “live freely.” Relatedly, a (negative) freedom from external constraints—often the concern of centrist liberals—has been critiqued for lacking the enabling aspect of a (positive) freedom to act and live in a full range of capacities. Even a seemingly innocent, apparently self-evident term like freedom, then, is the subject of ferocious ideological struggles, which will likely never stop raging as long as there is history to be made.

We are ruled by empty, floating signifiers that are loaded with particular meanings through apparatuses of communicative or symbolic power. One key lesson of social theory is that words do not possess meaning in and of themselves but acquire meaning as determined by powerful social actors. Which understanding of a signifier ultimately prevails depends on the outcomes of symbolic struggles.

Peace and Love—Yes, Please!

Is all of this to say that we should just abandon Ringo’s ideas as either hopelessly naïve, or worse, impossible to pin down, because all signifiers are bound to be vacuous, floating in a slipstream of competing (propagandistic) attempts to redefine and overwrite them?

On the contrary, the proper lesson to draw is that we can cherish certain ideals, including the shorthand political keywords that encapsulate them, and even fight to build a world on top of them, but we have to recognize that their meanings are always—inherently—going to be slippery, contested, and contestable. Nefarious actors can get at words and pull them in unsavory or dangerous directions. Political leaders can deploy techniques of communication to shape hearts and minds, converting hatred into “love” and war into “peace.” Even as we employ seemingly innocent terms in our everyday political discourse, we must be mindful of how opposing factions can appropriate and redeploy those same words with their preferred meaning in mind.

And that’s the risk with Ringo’s approach. In recent years, he has shown more interest in social justice issues. During the Black Lives Matter protests, he expressed his support for the movement, sharing a powerful statement from his former bandmate McCartney, writing: “As my brother Paul said The Beatles always stood for equal rights&justice and I’ve never stopped working for peace&love ever since.”

Specifying the content is important. In an age of spectacle and spectacular opposition, vague sloganeering or anodyne generalities are always at risk of being captured by odious political actors. Ours is an era of co-optation—of overwriting and redirection. Ringo’s message, if left underspecified, is vulnerable to this. Moreover, there remains an element of the spectacle in Ringo’s promotion of the phrase: as The Atlantic observed of one of his peace-and-love celebrations earlier this year, “Throughout, the Ringo habitat stayed blissfully sealed off from Donald Trump, Joe Biden, national reckonings, crises of democracy, and things of that nature.”

But despite that—perhaps even in spite of himself—Ringo’s “peace and love” mantra retains the power to inspire. It takes us back to the bed-ins of John and Yoko, to the marvelous simplicity of some of the world’s great spiritual and political traditions, and peels back the calcified cynicism of an era devolving into fascist authoritarianism.

Symbolic struggles never end. History keeps spinning. As long as words have power—in other words, as long as there are humans left to speak and interpret within social collectivities—there will be battles over meaning. That shouldn’t stop us from embracing Ringo’s inspiring commandment. But it does mean that we have to clarify our terms—and be prepared to defend them. Peace and love.

Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes (2025). Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House. William Morrow.

In Fight, veteran political reporters Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes guide us through one of the most momentous electoral campaigns in recent memory, offering a post-operative assessment of Kamala Harris’s whirlwind 107-day effort—launched in the wake of Biden’s less-than-stellar debate performance in late June 2024—and Trump’s third-iteration campaign machine that ultimately secured him a second term. Figuring out what went wrong with Harris’s campaign, and why Trump was successful after crashing so decisively in 2020, should be of essential interest to anyone to the left of fascism.

As Fight’s taut and surprisingly thrilling narrative makes clear, the odds were always stacked against Harris: forced into turbo mode, with little more than three months to convince the American people of her suitability for highest office, her campaign was rolled out under the shadow of a president still clinging to the throne—Biden, of course, wasn’t going anywhere. “Nobody walks away from this,” as one senior White House advisor is quoted as saying. “No one walks away from the house, the plane, the helicopter”—a reminder of the banal material seductiveness of U.S. presidential power. Biden was unwilling, or unable, to let go and give Harris the necessary room to maneuver.

Could Biden’s avarice for power have cost the Democrats the White House? More positively, what could Biden have done to help Harris win? After the switch to Harris as the presumptive Democratic nominee by late July, he could have resigned as president, handing over the presidential mantle to Harris and allowing her a share in the enormous prestige of the presidency, which might have given her a clearer shot at the White House. Less dramatically, he could have never opted to run for a second term in the first place, leaving the field open for a proper Democratic primary to run its course.

Hovering Biden

As political reporters, Allen and Parnes do not speculate about the what-if questions of alternate history, but they do offer a convincing implicit argument about the long arc of the Democrats’ election campaign—what I would describe as the “No Daylight Hypothesis.” From the outset of Harris’s late start, Biden made it clear—in paternalistic terms—that he would permit Harris no substantial deviation from a course already laid out by him:

To the extent that she wanted to forge her own path, Biden had no interest in giving her room to do so. He needed just three words to convey how much all of that mattered to him. “No daylight, kid,” Biden said.”

Their political fates were intertwined, their projects one and the same: even as the Democratic presidential nominee, Harris was not to distance herself from her increasingly unpopular boss.

By the end of the summer, Biden had become the hoverer-in-chief, hanging over the Harris campaign, and on multiple occasions Biden directly undermined her efforts—perhaps most notably with the infamous “garbage” remark: “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters,” Biden had said during a live webcast that, incredibly, was scheduled to take place as Harris herself was delivering an important speech at the Ellipse. Biden claimed he was using the possessive, “his supporter’s,” singular, but it seems implausible. “At least Hillary Clinton had shown enough compassion to apply her ‘basket of deplorables’ label to only half of Trump’s base,” Allen and Parnes (hereafter A&P) write. “It was a gift,” one senior Trump aide says in the book, and Biden’s blunder stole the spotlight from Harris at a crucial final moment in the campaign. “Why are you doing anything public-facing during her speech?! Why are you competing with us, dude?” one senior Harris advisor vents to the authors.

While “no daylight” was probably sensible on the economic and cultural issues for which Biden was still sufficiently progressive to allow a repeat of 2020, tying Harris to his catastrophic position on Gaza was another matter altogether. Biden’s unwillingness to block the Netanyahu government’s genocidal policies in Gaza, continuing instead to provide extensive military and financial support to Israel, combined with Harris’s disinclination to distance herself from Biden’s position, was a devastating liability.

A&P report Harris’s aides’ claims that “behind the scenes,” she had “urged Biden to pay more attention to civilians in Gaza,” even if it “was not an issue that she raised publicly.” While difficult to assess, what we do know is that both as vice president and as presidential contender Harris made little effort to signal a change of course on Gaza—or even just to offer an outstretched hand to voters repelled by the killing of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians by Israeli forces. A&P describe the Gaza question as “the deepest, most painful rift in their party,” heading into the Democratic National Convention in August, but it was a rift neither Biden or Harris seemed at all interested in repairing. Harris’s steadfast continuation of support for Netanyahu’s government—a case of “no daylight” if there ever was one—surely contributed to her defeat. It likely suppressed the youth vote, and it pushed genocide-conscious voters into the arms of third-party candidates and even Trump himself, however misguidedly.

The Cheney Disaster

But A&P show that Harris’s problems went far beyond “no daylight,” emphasizing instead how Harris wielded agency and was an active participant in her campaign’s undoing. In particular, A&P are unenthusiastic about Harris’s decision to tack rightward and seek out disaffected Republican voters alienated by Trump’s MAGA extremism. The “Cheney experiment”—Harris’s cultivation of Liz Cheney during her late October “blue wall” tour—always seemed unlikely to succeed, if only because Harris and Cheney “made for strange political bedfellows, agreeing on virtually nothing but their disdain for Trump.” The strategy was perhaps well-intentioned, motivated by an attempt to “find new GOP voters—particularly suburban women—and attract media attention.” But just like Harris’s promise to include a Republican in her future cabinet, the Cheney experiment simply didn’t work. As The Nation’s John Nichols later observed, under the pointed headline “Liz Cheney Was an Electoral Fiasco for Kamala Harris,” her Republican courtship “added few if any votes to the Democratic total” and likely “alienated voters” who still remembered her father’s role in the disastrous Iraq War.

The Trump campaign made mistakes too, of course. In particular, the Madison Square Garden rally that included the MAGA-friendly comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, threatened to derail Trump’s rainbow strategy a little more than a week before Election Day. Hinchcliffe’s racist remarks about Puerto Ricans—at a time when Trump was courting Hispanic voters, including the nearly six million people who consider themselves to be of Puerto Rican descent in the continental United States—was described (understatedly) by one Trump adviser as a “staff error”:

We should be able to control everybody but the principal. If Donald Trump wants to get up there and say what he says, that’s his prerogative. But if a staffer invites some dipshit comedian, that’s a staff problem. And that’s where I get upset.

Given what Trump himself said about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio allegedly “eating cats, dogs and geese” the month before, those faux-aggrieved words ring hollow. But A&P show a Trump campaign that, setting aside the content of its politics, was far from technically perfect—a point easily forgotten given the final outcome.

In the Comms Shop

One thing the Trump team likely did better than Harris was its mastery of both national and local messaging. The Harris campaign was too nationally oriented, A&P write, often seeming to run a “campaign for Axios and Politico,” as one advisor put it, while Trump did well on both levels. “He obviously had a national message, but when he would go to states, he was so good at talking about local wedge issues in a way that we never could,” a Harris campaign official is quoted as saying. “Our leadership was always very adamant that everything was about national message.” Clearly, that was a mistake: contemporary political communication demands not just a coherent overarching message, but segmentation and specificity, tailoring narratives to target particular groups.

While Fight could have brought us deeper into the comms shop, de-emphasizing the candidates-in-themselves and recentering the massive communications operations that went into securing Trump’s victory (and, perhaps, ensuring Harris’s failure), including the technical solutions that lay behind them, A&P do give tantalizing glimpses of the considerable spin-doctoring that went on behind the scenes. Trump’s transgender attack ad is a case in point. The 30-second ad revolving around the transphobic message, “Kamala is for they/them. I am for you,” was depressingly successful: the New York Times reported that it “shifted the race 2.7 percentage points in Mr. Trump’s favor after viewers watched it,” and it “aired more than 30,000 times, including in all seven swing states,” according to NPR, in the final weeks of the election.

Here Fight turns into a case study in MAGA communications, which started with a question raised by one of Trump’s PR strategists: “What’s the craziest thing we’ve got on her?”. Answer: Harris’s response to a 2019 ACLU questionnaire where she—to her infinite credit—“pledged to make sure that transgender people who relied on the government for medical care—including those in prison and in immigration detention—would be able to have surgeries at taxpayer expense.” It was catnip to the Trump campaign, and the team ran through several attack-ad iterations, including Trump’s personal sign-off on the wording. The ad aired “during NFL games and later the World Series,” and it “used Harris’s own words to show her as a potential danger to voters. Soft on gender. Soft on crime. Soft on immigration. Reckless with taxpayer dollars,” the authors write. “In other words, she was an extremist.”

Too Little, Too Long

Of course, Harris wasn’t an extremist—that’s the whole point, and in part, the problem. Especially toward the end of the campaign, Harris seemed to pull rightward, or pull her punches, fearing she would be perceived as an extremist—though in the end, the Trump campaign ended up smearing her as one anyway.

Frustratingly, in purely policy terms, Harris had a strong economic populist streak. She carried forward elements from Sanders’ energizing 2016 and 2020 campaigns and Biden’s progressive economic stance. Released in early September, a Harris campaign ad, “Focused,” embodied all the tenets of economic populism, pledging to tackle “economic speculators” and “price gouging,” while attacking Trump for offering “tax cuts for big corporations.” A week earlier, Harris had promised to build 3 million new homes and offer a $25,000 subsidy for first-time home buyers, a “nod to the party’s populist mood,” in the words of a Washington Post commentator—but perhaps more than just a nod.

Still, something changed toward the end of her campaign: The economic populism went quietly slinking out the back door. “The campaign’s closing message centered more than anything on . . . the defense of democracy and the danger Trump posed to it,” as one analysis put it. She attended town hall meetings with the aforementioned Cheney, where there was much talk of rallying to “support and defend the Constitution”—undoubtedly an important point, but one that entailed a more muted emphasis on economic issues. The billionaire Mark Cuban was enlisted as a campaign surrogate, and recent reporting even suggests he was asked to submit for vetting as vice-presidential contender. Harris swung toward center-ground, probably more in terms of communication than actual policy substance, but the loss of nerve in messaging on the economy was ill-conceived. Pandering to that ever-dwindling demographic, the moderate conservative, she was also, to many on the left’s utter bewilderment, unwilling to speak up on Gaza. It cost her.

But in a way, by the late summer of 2024 it may already have been too late. The lesson I draw from Fight is that Harris never really stood a real chance. More time wouldn’t have helped: there was a moment in October where Harris’s numbers were solid across multiple swing states, and had the election taken place then, in some counterfactual universe, she might have eked out a victory. In a way, 107 days was both too much time—and too little.

For ultimately, it was Biden who sealed his party’s fate by deciding to run a second time around in November 2022—his “worst strategic decision” in the words of one commentator. Fight relays the words of a “former high-ranking government official who is close to both Biden and Obama,” who by July 2024 believed Biden had “damned his party by committing ‘the original sin’ of running for a second term.” By the summer of 2024, following the fateful late June debate with Trump, it was probably too late in the game to change Democratic horses: The time to give someone else a chance to run lay back in 2022, but Biden’s pride had led him to seek renewed power. When Donald Trump was shot on July 13th, the Democrats’ fate was certain. Harris’s only chance would have been to remain firmly progressive, but for this she lacked either the personal inclination or the maneuvering room—or both. Lesson learned, one hopes.

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At first glance, TACO, or “Trump Always Chickens Out,” seemed like a smart, playful acronym when it first began making the rounds on social media earlier this year. In the wake of Trump’s apparent vacillation over global tariffs, TACO named a feature of Trump 2.0’s first few months: While “reciprocal” tariffs were announced on April 2nd to much fanfare, they were shortly thereafter paused for a number of countries, suggestive of a Trump White House once again in disarray despite the post-2024 election propaganda about a more professional and polished second-term Trump. Trump 2.0 was still, it seemed, characterized by brash pronouncements one moment, followed by the inevitable climb-down the next, as markets were roiled by MAGA shock therapy. In a piece published weeks before the Iran strikes, the FT’s Gideon Rachman has also drawn attention to a study showing that Trump has threatened dozens of adversaries with the use of force, but "only" deployed force a handful of times. Hence, TACO: Trump always backs down, chickens out, doesn’t have the guts to stay the course.

In one sense, of course, TACO seemed to hit Trump where it hurt. Like all far-right authoritarians, Trump values strength—or a particular conventional understanding of strength—above all else. To call him weak seemed like a form of resistance to Trump’s toxic brand of politics. And he didn’t like it. “I chicken out? I’ve never heard that,” he said in a late May press meeting in the Oval Office. “Don’t ever say what you said,” he told one reporter. “That’s a nasty question. To me, that’s the nastiest question.” TACO held him to account by his own standards: You may say you’re strong, but when push comes to shove you’re actually quite weak—you chicken out.

In this sense, it was a always a somewhat peculiar criticism, especially coming from the left: The problem with Trump, TACO implied, was not the content of Trump’s politics but rather his own failure to live up to his promises—that is, not delivering the content of his politics fully enough. In other words, it was an attack on Trump’s hypocrisy rather than on the substance of Trump’s politics.

But this is always a risky maneuver for critics to undertake, because it’s a criticism that can be addressed by implementing policies these critics likely disagree with. With TACO in hand, we might ask: Do we really want a non-hypocritical fascist authoritarian in power? On the contrary, one might say: The only thing worse than a two-faced right-wing authoritarian is a right-wing authoritarian who does exactly what they promised they would do.

Chickening Out—or Doubling Down?

Another way of thinking about this is to say that TACO is a form of immanent critique, as the Frankfurt School might have put it, a criticism that operates on the terrain of the enemy, so to speak, deploying the adversary’s own criteria to denounce or oppose them. This can be a strategically smart move under a narrow set of political circumstances—when one’s opponents are on the cusp of having their hegemony dismantled, say, or at least fundamentally weakened; that is, when there are just enough supporters of the old order who are on the brink of turning against the old ways, and yet who are, intellectually and ideologically, still wedded to the old order’s ways of thinking. Under these narrow conditions, using the ideas and language of the old order against it might push unsure supporters over the top and bring them to one’s own side.

But immanent critique risks backfiring in a situation where one’s opponent enjoys near-total hegemonic dominance—arguably the case with Trump 2.0. Yes, there are signs of a budding oppositional social movement (the “No Kings” protests brought around five million people out into the streets across the U.S.), but the organized political opposition, the Democratic Party’s net unfavorability has actually grown under Trump’s first five months in power—a staggering feat given the extremism of Trump 2.0—and its leadership is characterized more by a failure to criticize the Trump White House than of rising to the occasion (with a few notable exceptions, mainly from scattered elected representatives than the leadership as such).

When there is no credible, high-functioning, well-organized political opposition, immanent critique only risks goading the powers that be into doubling down. And that is precisely what TACO threatens to accomplish in the present moment—to the extent that it plays a formative role in the discursive landscape at all. Since Trump hates being called weak, he is likely to respond to TACO, and relatedly patterned responses, with what we might call “TADD”: Trump Always Doubles Down. Or, going further, TADWHW: Trump Always Does What He Wants—admittedly more of a mouthful than the elegance of TACO.

Revalorizing Politics

TACO is not a formula that tries to fundamentally shift the terms of debate. But if we look back through history, there are plenty of movements that have. Think about the history of early Christianity, when the apostle Paul faced off the strength-worshipping Roman Empire: As he journeyed around the Mediterranean to cement a semi-subterranean network of early communities of believers, he penned letters to his communities where he laid out his religious, but also organizational and even political, vision.

In one famous passage, Paul tries to upend the ancient world’s ethical order by announcing, brashly: “For when I am weak, then I am strong”—an almost delusional statement that flew in the face of the might-makes-right paradigm governing the ancient world. “I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses,” Paul writes in the same passage. “I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties.” Within the context of antiquity, this must have seemed deeply strange, just as it remains puzzling and disconcerting even today, if we take in the full weight of his words. Strength is weakness, weakness is strength, Paul proclaims—almost like a Zen koan. When the Roman Empire slaughters its enemies, this is actually a sign of their (ethical) weakness; when early Christ-believers are devoured by lions in the arena, this is actually a sign of their ethical steadfastness and, yes, strength.

Paul’s almost delirious statement—how can weakness be strength?—is an early example of the tactical deployment of revalorization, assigning new and counterintuitive, paradoxical, or inverted meanings to behaviors, ideas, and social phenomena. His was a theological motivation, of course, but we need not be detained by that part of the story. The broader political point is that any oppositional movement must, sooner or later, realize the inherent improbability of trying to win political struggles on the terrain of the adversary—certainly when that adversary is significantly more powerful.

By sociopolitical alchemy, revalorization turns a demerit into a merit. It upends the ethical-political order by throwing its terms up into the air and assigning new meanings. And it does so because it recognizes that this paradoxical, almost delusional move is the only way a fundamentally weak movement can ever really stand a chance against the powers of the world.

Raw Power—and Its Discontents

What would a revalorizing approach to Trump look like, then? It would state that the problem with Trump isn’t so much that he “chickens out”—lighthearted and amusing as that image is, of course, especially to those tired of his deeply destructive policies—but that, precisely, he doubles down, or—increasingly—does exactly what he wants. This is worse than chickening out, because it suggests a certain swaggering dominance by someone who knows the full weight of their power.

But in so doing, Trump thereby reveals his essential ethical weakness, which is the “weakness” betrayed by the conventional world in all its worship of raw strength and power—a world increasingly has come to prize might alone in all its conventional forms: military firepower, economic supremacy, dominion over both our fellow human beings and the natural world. Revalorizing politics in the age of Trump 2.0 means challenging its fundamental coordinates, up to and including superficial notions of strength and bravery, or conventional understandings of masculinity and power, which are part of the reason we find ourselves in this political situation in the first place.

* * *

When I was engaged in ethnographic field research on parole hearings in the California state prison system some years ago, one of the parole commissioners gave me a piece of advice: If someone ever threatens you with a gun, he said, never ever say, “What are you gonna do, shoot me?” Because they just might. He had seen—or heard—it happen too many times in the course of his career.

That exchange came back to me as I started thinking more closely about TACO: What are you going to do, President Trump—actually implement your stated policies? Well, he just might. Best not to goad him into it.

The problem with Trump isn't so much that he's a hypocrite—though he is that as well, especially with his former “antiwar” or isolationist posturing now rapidly being falsified—or that he lacks follow-through, but that he's busy doing exactly what he promised he'd do and much more besides. Trump’s supposed cowardice is the least of our problems. Better to focus our critical energies elsewhere.

From the MAGA perspective, Trump has spent the first 100 days of his second term well. Clearly intent on making better use of his time than the last time around, Trump has embarked on what I have called a blitzkrieg presidency: a frenetic politics of shock-and-awe intent on “flooding the zone.” Policies range from from the bizarre, such as ordering the federal government to stop buying paper straws, to the world-impacting, like the infamous April 2nd tariffs. As the Washington Post writes, “No president in modern times has moved more swiftly than Trump to remake so many parts of government, as well as some outside institutions.” In so doing, the 47th president seems to have hoped to disorient and overwhelm any opposition to his administration’s far-reaching program of institutional, economic, and cultural transformation.

By April 25th, Trump had issued more than two hundred executive orders, far more than any of his recent predecessors—though as multiple critics have pointed out, the exact obligations these orders have given rise to remain dubious; as Hillary Clinton has observed, “Executive orders are not royal decrees.” Trump has in effect gone to war on the judiciary, ignoring judges’ orders, and even arresting a judge in Wisconsin. Trump 2.0 clearly means business in a way that Trump 1.0 simply didn’t, which almost immediately got off to an amateurish start with Sean Spicer’s “abnormal press conference,” as the New Yorker described it. The first term was beset with chaos and undermined by halting action, ultimately resulting in Biden defeating Trump by nearly 7 million votes in 2020.

This time around things are different.

On April 2nd, or “Liberation Day,” tariffs were imposed on most parts of the world at levels not seen since the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930. Trump’s tariffs have largely had a disastrous effect on market confidence and US consumer sentiment, now at its lowest level since May 2020. But after some backtracking and a “pause” (which isn’t really a pause), the truly exorbitant protectionist rates have been reserved for China; under the influence of China hawks like Pete Navarro, the Trump administration appears intent on attempting to single out China and isolate it, as the Wall Street Journal reported earlier in April.

Meanwhile, academic institutions are being disciplined, all with the aim of stamping out progressive, or even just minimally critical, thought from college campuses; as J. D. Vance said back in 2021, in an allusion to a remark made by Nixon in the 1970s, “The professors are the enemy.” Trump 2.0’s campaign against academe aims to quell dissent and stamp out the kind of autonomous thinking that, at its best, is the hallmark of the university as an institution.

To Eject and Confine

Strikingly, a machinery of deportation, kidnapping, and brutal incarceration is being mobilized, aided most conspicuously by El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, who is, of course, just one cog in the American “expulsion-industrial” complex. Trump’s ICE agency celebrated “record-breaking immigration enforcement in the US interior” at the 100 day-mark, arresting 66,000 individuals and deporting some 65,000 “illegal aliens” (a horrific phrase).

The Trump-Bukele axis has been long in the works. Last year, the Congressional El Salvador Caucus was established, founded by the now-disgraced Matt Gaetz. Under the terms of their unholy alignment, individuals like Kilmar Abrego Garcia have been denied due process and sent to the hellhole dungeon CECOT, a “Terrorism Confinement Center” an hour’s drive from San Salvador that practically makes California’s Pelican Bay look like a holiday camp.

One revealing, and chilling, detail from CECOT life: Inmates are “never allowed outdoors” in this prison that can hold 40,000 prisoners who are, moreover, denied any form of animal protein and given very little in the way of plant-based proteins. “Forbidden to use utensils,” the New York Times reports, inmates “eat paltry meals—tortillas, rice, beans, instant pasta—with their hands. It makes for a malnourished, lethargic, and compliant prisoner population, kept in cells for 23.5 hours a day. “Some are held in solitary confinement cells, which are completely dark,” Human Rights Watch records. One telling detail shown in a video report from the facility: In one mega-cells, the toilet was was conspicuously located next to the water basin from which prisoners draw all their drinking water—an arrangement practically guaranteed to result in pathogenic exposure. By design, CECOT appears predicated on deprivation, control, even terror—ironic for an institution purportedly meant to contain terrorism. CECOT’s medieval cruelty combined with penal austerity and industrial-style panoptic surveillance makes for a uniquely degrading institution.

Little wonder, then, that Trump has embraced Bukele and, by implication, CECOT: The “El Salvador solution” allows him to pose as the strongman Father-figure who will beat back (purportedly) criminal immigrants and protect the (allegedly) innocent majority, all while evading constitutional prohibitions on “cruel and unusual” punishment. During Bukele’s White House visit in mid-April, Trump warned that “homegrowns are next,” meaning that US citizens could find themselves exiled or banished—“deported” isn’t the right word, for these aren’t non-nationals—to a CECOT-like dungeon in the near future. Trump asked that Bukele “build about five more places” like CECOT, appearing to set in motion plans to construct American-funded gulags in this Central American country, which is quickly becoming a vassal in the starkest sense, a mere appendage to the MAGAmerican Empire.

Subordination and Coordination

To what end is all this being done? What the first 100 days have been about, fundamentally, is the implementation of a systematic program of subordination and coordination. Trump is asserting his authority over state, civil society, and the market—in other words, the totality of societal existence. All social, cultural, and economic actors are being forced to relate to the Trump administration one way or another. The administration’s assertion of authority may not always be successful, and there may even be a number of misfirings in the months and years ahead. But the attempt at asserting this near-total control is in itself concerning.

The Trump administration has tried to effect a kind of enforced submission of numerous consequential institutions and actors, including universities, Big Law (with multiple major law firms largely submitting to Trump’s dictates, the most recent of which have promised to provide $600 million in pro bono work “to causes supported by the president”), and the media (the target of multiple Trump lawsuits, including a highly consequential battle with CBS over 60 Minutes). Culturally, it’s telling that a sitting US president would essentially name themselves board chair of an institution like the Kennedy Center: It shows the granular nature of Trump’s concern with remaking the American cultural landscape. LGBTQ events around Pride Month have been cancelled by the Kennedy Center.

In the realm of the economy, while there is some speculation that Trump has bought into the outlandish theory that tariffs could ultimately replace income taxation as the government’s leading source of revenue, which his own recent comments suggest, far more important is the power tariffs give the state over corporations through the power of exemptions. As Carl Schmitt famously observed in the 1920s: “Sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception.” With tariffs, Trump can essentially control the lifeblood of all trade-dependent businesses: His administration can in effect preside over, precisely, the “state of exception” governing these firms, their wider sectors, and geographic partners. Tariffs create the possibility of a court-like system of economic tyranny in which corporate petitioners must grovel before their ruler, prostrating themselves before almighty Trump to “make a deal” in return for possible relief. This is, in a nutshell, fascist economics. Apple’s announcement that it aims to shift production of US-bound iPhones from China to India by the end of 2026, is a stunning example of corporate America, and Silicon Valley more narrowly, bending the knee to the Trump administration.

Signs of Resistance

Still, the shock-and-awe tactic hasn’t been nearly as successful as Trump may have hoped. Economists now believe the risk of recession, both for the US and global economy, is greater than it has been in years. Millions of Americans have taken to the streets—most notably, the Hands Off protests in early April saw an estimated three to five million participants—to rally against what amounts to a revolutionary remaking of the American social and political order. Numerous lawsuits opposed to various elements of the Trump agenda have been launched, whether from businesses challenging the consequences of Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs or civil-society actors bristling against an immigration crackdown that has run roughshod over the right to due process, and more. A Trump 2.0 “Litigation Tracker” currently counts more than 200 ongoing cases against the administration.

Both allies and adversaries on the world stage, too, are pushing back against Trump’s swaggering neomercantilism, including an assertive China that so far shows little sign of backing down from a trade war with the world’s number-one economic power. As one BBC commentator put it: “Beijing is not going to surrender.” Some social media users in China reportedly refer, half-jokingly, to Trump as Chuān Jiànguó or “Trump the Nation-Builder,” a “pseudo-Chinese name” riffing on the idea that Trump’s economic policies are actually aiding China’s rise.

Additionally, Europe is more unified than ever, largely against the US, following Trump’s ugly attack on Zelenskyy in an awful Oval Office showdown in late February. Trump’s imperialist designs on Greenland, a part of the Kingdom of Denmark, itself a NATO ally and loyal participant in the US’ post-9/11 wars, haven’t helped either.

Trump failed, too, in his bungling efforts to bring Canadian voters to his camp. He committed the almost comical tactical blunder of recommending—on election day—that Canadians vote for a nameless candidate who would fit the MAGA ideological bill, while simultaneously threatening to turn his northern neighbor into a “51st state.” Unsurprisingly, Canadians ended up favoring Mark Carney’s Liberal Party. In his victory speech, Prime Minister Carney said: “President Trump is trying to break us, so that America can own us. That will . . . never, ever happen.”

In short, Trump has made skeptics out of friends, and strengthened the hand of his adversaries.

If Trump is a fascist, which I have argued he is, then his attempt to forge a specifically American version of fascism now seems less certain than it did when he first took office in January. For one thing, business leaders are beginning to wake up. Amidst declining business activity in the country’s second-largest state economy, Texas, executives there “used words like ‘chaos’ and ‘insanity’ to describe the turmoil spurred by President Donald Trump’s tariffs,” according to a report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. A Republican president losing Texas business conservatives is remarkable.

Similarly, and quite sensibly, the e-commerce giant Amazon reported that it now plans to display how much Trump’s tariffs will cost consumers next to each item listed on its website, which the administration immediately labeled a “hostile and political act.” (Amazon later walked back the proposed changes after Trump pressured Amazon owner Jeff Bezos.) MAGA is fracturing the American capitalist class, with the trade-oriented merchant class-fraction increasingly hostile toward Trump 2.0. Elon Musk’s disparaging remarks about Navarro being a “moron” and his repeated efforts to block the tariffs from being implemented are another case in point. The contradictions are intensifying, just as I predicted they would when I wrote shortly after Trump’s inauguration.

More democratically, Trump’s 100-day approval rating is lower than that of any other president in the past 80 years. At the near-100-day mark, a poll showed that 39 percent thought Trump had been a “terrible” president, whereas only 18 percent thought he had been “great.” Many are finding that the far-right’s revolutionary remaking of the state, social order, and economy threatens their livelihoods. Approval ratings won’t stop fascists in their tracks, of course, but the socio-political legitimacy that any revolutionary project necessarily relies upon has deteriorated rapidly. Trumpism, as a specifically American invariant of 21st-century fascism is, quite simply, not very popular: Whether that in itself will be enough to derail this revolution from the right remains to be seen.

The United States, though fiercely militaristic across much of the globe, has been a friend and protector to the Nordic countries. Unlike Iraqis, Afghans, Vietnamese, and other peoples around the world who have become acquainted with the uglier realities of American empire, the Nordics have done well by the transatlantic relationship.

Freed from hot conflicts and dangerous geopolitical entanglements, the Nordics have been left alone to develop their natural resources and industrial base, from Denmark’s Novo Nordisk to Norway’s highly profitable oil sector, netting it the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund, and Sweden’s globally-oriented companies like IKEA and Spotify.

With Donald Trump’s second term, however, it’s a relationship that looks increasingly uncertain.

Trump’s bellicose statements on Greenland, a semi-autonomous part of the Kingdom of Denmark, followed by his suggestion that the United States might not come to NATO members’ aid unless defense spending increases, and his seeming “pivot to Russia”—a historic adversary of the Nordics—have all helped cast doubt on the U.S.-Nordic relationship.

Trump-Induced Anxieties

Norway’s reliance on American-made F-35 fighter jets is a case in point. Some have started asking pointed questions about the risks posed by Trump’s America to the northern European nation’s military hardware.

To be sure, Norway isn’t alone in this regard. As the Financial Times asked in March: “Can the US switch off Europe’s weapons?”. But with more than fifty F-35s in its fleet, and as the first country to have received its full order from the manufacturer Lockheed Martin—the final two jets were delivered in April—the issue has seemed especially pertinent in Norway.

While Norwegian defense experts insisted that the U.S. had no “big red button” with which to disable the jets, experts also noted that a reliance on U.S.-made parts and weapons meant the country would only be able to operate the fleet for a matter of “months” without full U.S. support.

No one seems to think this is likely to come to an end any time soon. Even Denmark, more directly assailed by the second Trump administration over Greenland’s sovereignty, renewed its commitment to buying F-35s in March. And Norway looks set to permit a record 12 U.S. military bases on its territory, under the provisions of a 2022 defense agreement.

But the fact that these questions are even being asked is arresting. Indeed, the very notion that Washington might pose a “risk” at all would have been unthinkable, at least in public, just six months ago.

Arctic Troubles

Trump’s aggressive actions toward Greenland has been a significant source of anxiety in the Nordic countries, nowhere more than in Denmark itself.

Despite Denmark’s loyal service in the U.S.-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Trump’s increasingly insistent message that “we’re going to get” Greenland, a territory that has been under some form of Danish rule for centuries, has ruffled the Danish public and the political establishment.

Certainly Denmark put itself in a difficult position with its reluctance to deal with its historical role as colonizer. Failing to recognize long-simmering resentments and grievances against the mainland has left Greenland vulnerable to Trump’s propaganda blitz.

Take just one example: Starting in the 1960s, Denmark implemented a forcible fertility control program in Greenland, leading fertility rates to plummet. Nearly 4,500 girls and women—around half of Greenland’s population of women of reproductive age at the time—were made to use contraceptive coils. The demographic effects were staggering: Greenland’s population remained essentially at a standstill throughout much of the 1970s.

Controlling Greenlandic women’s fertility can be seen as a form of eugenics, echoing Denmark’s forced sterilization law in effect from the late 1920s to the 1960s. And while Denmark ordered an official investigation of the spiral case in 2023, with results expected this year, some have felt the process has been too long-drawn and have demanded an immediate apology. 67 Greenlandic sued the Danish government in 2023.

There are other contentious issues, such as the size of Denmark’s annual cash transfer to Greenland’s authorities, and reports of racism towards Greenlanders as they travel to mainland Denmark for work or school.

Some Danish politicians have given voice to such racism. The Danish center-right politician Søren Pape Poulsen’s 2022 remark that “Greenland is Africa on ice” brought to bear colonial, racist notions about both the African continent and Denmark’s former colony.

There are legitimate concerns about Denmark’s colonial past and current attitudes towards Greenland, then, which have pushed more Greenlanders to call for full independence, including then-Prime Minister Múte Egede in his 2024 New Year’s address.

But Trump and his team have strategically, and ruthlessly, exploited these issues. Following a January visit to Greenland’s capital Nuuk, Trump’s son, Don Jr. appeared on Fox News’ Hannity and claimed that Greenlanders were treated as “second- and third-class citizens” by Denmark. At a Mar-a-Lago press conference that same week, Trump questioned the legality of Danish control of Greenland: “People really don’t even know if Denmark has any legal right to it.” And during a visit to the U.S. Pituffik Space Base in northwest Greenland, Vice President J.D. Vance accused Denmark of having “underinvested in the people of Greenland.”

In these and many other ways, Trump and his team have used the rhetoric of anticolonialism to advance their own imperial designs on the Arctic territory. It’s a clever, manipulative inversion.

And it’s leading Denmark to reassess its relationship with the United States. Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen told Marco Rubio in early April that the U.S. was carrying out an “attack on the Kingdom of Denmark’s sovereignty.” American aggression has even prompted Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen to ask: “What are we to believe in about the country that we have admired for so many years?”

And yet, Denmark’s government has vowed to implement a 2023 agreement allowing the U.S. to access three air bases on Danish soil, even though recent polling showed that more than 40 percent of Danes—a majority—opposed the move. PM Frederiksen has also vowed to continue working with the U.S.: “If we let ourselves be divided as allies, then we do our foes a favor. And I will do everything that I can to prevent that from happening.”

The Limits of Autonomy

This contradiction—between the threat of annexation and continued loyalty—shows that even for wealthy northern European nations, there are real limits to how far one can push back against American power.

Quite where all of this will end remains unclear. But the Nordics seem likely to turn increasingly inward to their regional neighbors and Europe at large. Already, Norway, which has long remained outside the European Union, is beginning carefully to broach the question of a renewed EU membership bid—even as Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre has said the timing for another referendum isn’t right. And Denmark and Norway promised in February to “increase cooperation on defense.” Sweden and Finland joined the Norway-led Nordic Response military exercise last year.

But the Nordics are unlikely to abandon the U.S., if only because the U.S. is unlikely to allow them too much leeway or latitude. In late March, Finland’s president Alexander Stubb flew in to Florida to play golf with President Trump. The bonds remain tight, and American military force is, obviously, formidable.

There’s no Nordic nuclear umbrella either, even as scattered voices have started calling for a Nordic nuclear weapons program—once unthinkable in the land of the Nobel Peace Prize.

But tough questions are being asked, and basic stances reassessed. In this regard, the Nordics are catching up to parts of the world, including large swathes of the Global South, that have long understood the true nature of U.S. power.

Benjamin R. Teitelbaum (2020). War for Eternity: The Return of Traditionalism and the Rise of the Populist Right. Penguin Books.

Daniel A. Bell (2023). The Dean of Shandong: Confessions of a Minor Bureaucrat at a Chinese University. Princeton University Press.

Published half a decade ago now, War for Eternity examines the rise of the new right, including the alt-right or “populist nationalist” movement, via key figures like Steve Bannon, Aleksandr Dugin, and a smattering of other far-right characters from across the globe. Sadly, the book remains even more relevant now, five years later, under Trump 2.0.

Despite the wide cast of characters, Bannon is really the key player here. The US edition’s subtitle underscores the book’s Bannon-centricity, “Inside Bannon’s Far-Right Circle of Global Power Brokers”—which is depersonalized in the UK edition, whose subtitle, “The Return of Traditionalism and the Rise of the Populist Right,” offers a more intellectualist, “history of ideas” framing.

Benjamin Teitelbaum sketches Bannon’s intellectual formation through his (apparent) encounter with Traditionalism, an obscurantist ideology that combines, in varying degrees, spiritualism, esotericism, occultism, reactionary conservatism, and racial supremacism, via key figures like the fascist philosopher Julius Evola and the mystical metaphysician René Guénon.

A breezy read, Teitelbaum’s book is at its best when offering a richly textured portrayal of Bannon’s worldview. Bannon was and remains—via his influential War Room podcast, CPAC speeches, and global networking—a key MAGA ideologue. Famously, Bannon was ousted from the first Trump administration in mid-2017 after falling out with the Trump family: Jared Kushner and Ivanka are denounced by Bannon here for wanting to “maintain the status quo,” with Kushner described as a “centrist Democrat” in Teitelbaum’s retelling.

Bannon’s formal removal from power hasn’t stopped him from remaining essential to understanding both Trump’s first and second terms—and hence the world we all inhabit. Teitelbaum has had significant access to Bannon, to a lesser extent the Russian writer Aleksandr Dugin, documenting (retroactively, through interviews) their first encounter in Rome in November 2018, which appears now as a key event in the growing interweaving of Putinism and Trumpism.

Coming to this book five years after its publication, War for Eternity now feels less relevant in the extensive sections on the far-right philosopher Olavo de Carvalho, a significant influence on Bolsonaro—if only because Brazil’s former president now is finished, politically, and because the country appears to have turned a new page with Lula since 2023.

More importantly, in places, Teitelbaum’s book feels just a bit too bewitched with its main character, as indeed other reviewers have noted. Bannon morphs into just plain “Steve.” The price of proximity and extraordinary access is the risk of (involuntary) glorification, and serving as a conduit for Bannon’s own propagandistic worldview and account of Trump’s first term. We are never quite told why Bannon would offer the author access to his “circle of global power brokers”—what’s in it for “Steve”? Could it be that he hopes to gain respectability, a serious platform for his dangerous, divisive, and destructive views? This is a constant dilemma in journalism. But in War for Eternity, proximity at times drifts into at least the appearance of entrancement.

There’s also the risk of sanewashing, or ex post facto rationalizing, an ideological movement that is, at its core, aggressively simplistic, premised on hardline nationalism and reactionary values. The intellectualization of “Traditionalism” produces the illusion of ideological depth and historicity. But maybe Bannon himself has it right: “I’m just some fuckin’ guy, making it up as I go along.”

A Dean of Illiberalism

The Dean of Shandong, styled as the “confessions of a minor bureaucrat at a Chinese university,” is an at-times amusing collection of somewhat trifling essays, written by the Canadian political theorist and long-time China resident Daniel A. Bell (not to be confused with the earlier American sociologist Daniel Bell). One of the essays, for instance, asks why Chinese political leaders have felt compelled to dye their hair (short answer: to maintain the appearance of youthfulness and vigor)—and why Xi now appears to have abandoned the practice (though he may be dyeing in streaks of gray, Bell notes). It’s a smart, Erving Goffman–style attention to sociological detail.

But behind its seemingly trifling qualities, there is a great seriousness here, for Bell, a scholar of Confucianism, offers a kind of Confucian apologia for China’s system of governance. It’s an at times sycophantic narrative, all the more efficacious coming from an outsider born and raised in a high-functioning liberal democracy like Canada: If one wanted to mount a defense of the Confucian-“communist”-capitalist synthesis that is contemporary China, this one-time dean’s unconventional essays would surely be just the sort of thing one would want to put out there: lighthearted, quirky, yet essentially reconciled with the basic ideological parameters of the state from which it arises.

Bell has lived in China for decades, employed first as professor at Beijing’s prestigious Tsinghua University (while eccentrically owning a Thai restaurant, Purple Haze, popular among expats in the Chinese capital), before being tapped by the mighty Organization Department of the Chinese Communist Party, which annually presides over millions of appointments in the country’s sprawling public sector, to serve as Dean of the Faculty of Political Science at Shandong University—a newer, provincial university, but still something of a promotion: Few Westerners have ever been hired as deans, Bell observes. (He has since moved on to Hong Kong University.)

Of course, one has to ask why Bell was chosen for this post. The answer probably isn’t solely academic: Bell is also an effective propagandist of sorts. While he avers to be critical of China’s political system—and there are asides on corruption, Uyghur and Tibetan repression, and the “possibility of a return to Maoist-style personal dictatorship” after the abolition of term limits in 2018, initiating the era of Xi—the book is, as noted, a concise defense of the Chinese system. Bell doesn’t try to conceal these aims. As he readily admits,

I do have an agenda and I should come clean about normative commitments. I worry about the demonization of China and especially of its political system. I think much thinking and policy making in Western countries is based on crude stereotypes about China’s political system, such as the view that the CCP exercises total control over intellectual discourse and there is no room for independent thinking. The reality is much more complex, as I hope to show.

And he appears willing to make some concessions to China critics:

I most certainly do not want to deny that increased demonization is related to worrisome developments in Chinese politics over the past decade or so. The CCP—to a certain extent—has become more repressive at home and more aggressive abroad.

Other reviewers have approved of Bell’s charge that, in the words of the Financial Times’s critic, “western critics of China are often ignorant of the pros and cons of China’s system,” nevertheless, Bell’s own qualifiers often seem like a hedge intended to preempt criticism of what remains his essentially illiberal stance. Bell is no democrat: Except at the lowest levels of governance (e.g., “village councils”), where the stakes are less significant, Bell thinks China’s system of top-down corporatist governance is superior to Western liberal democracy. And he wants to foreground the system’s Confucianism: Bell half-jokingly thinks the CCP should be rebranded the Chinese Confucian Party when engaging abroad.

Bell’s controversial 2015 book, The China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy, mounted a longer defense of the Chinese model of governance, which he describes as a “political meritocracy” (a normative ideal, Bell recognizes, that the country does not live up to), and dismisses Western liberal democracy, under the formula “one person, one vote.” In a TED talk outlining his position, Bell describes how his sister in Canada thinks him “brainwashed” after having living “too long” in China. But one could just as easily flip it around, Bell says, and claim that it is she who has been brainwashed from having lived in the West for too long. Demonization is never good, but this sort of equivocating misses the mark. (Bell is an oddly charming speaker, and he jokes that he hopes his sister never sees the YouTube recording of his talk.)

And while the twice-election of Donald Trump has given new force to Bell’s criticism of liberal democracy—in essence, the Popperian observation that such a system can run itself into the ground—it’s hard to see why the answer to liberalism’s potential for self-defeat should be to roll over and implement an authoritarian “meritocracy”: That’s cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face. Meritocracy, moreover, is rarely as meritorious as its advocates suggest; the term was invented as an essentially satirical concept in the 1950s by the sociologist Michael Young to skewer unfolding political developments.

In the face of liberal democracy’s frailties, surely the answer should be more politics, not less—including encouraging citizens to engage in the (civic) educative experience of activism, and the strengthening of public media and systems of public education. That’s how you make populations less susceptible to the “mind bomb” of Trumpist propaganda.

Removing the people from the political equation isn’t meritocracy; it’s a recipe for oligarchy, or rule by the few, and aristocracy. And that may be just what Bell wants: In closing, he even advocates for a China led by a “symbolic monarch,” selected from Confucius’s present-day descendants.

A World Divided

Two very different books, then: one broaching the ideological merger between Bannonite MAGA-ism and Dugin-inflected Putinism, the other a defense of China’s illiberal system of governance, packaged as a light tale of bureaucratic woes at a provincial university. Can they tell us anything about our current geopolitical moment?

Whatever the rest of the world might think about it, China is committed to all three elements of its ideological mélange—Confucianism, Marxism, and free-market capitalism. This seemingly self-contradictory yet socio-economically coherent and powerful system—a form of “Communist capitalism” with Confucian values—makes China the only real contender for present-day U.S. hegemony.

Moreover, Trump’s ideological allies are eager to forge a union of far-right movements—not only with Putin’s Russia but also with other countries and continents—to remake the world in their image, which includes countering, even crushing, China. Bannon is far from the only MAGA ideologue to champion this position—see, for example, Peter Navarro’s numerous anti-China screeds. The wheels are being set in motion.

Both books suggest—perhaps unintentionally—the very real possibility of an impending U.S.-China confrontation, already unfolding in the form of an escalating trade war, sparked by Trump’s recent tariffs. What makes this confrontation so dangerous—beyond the scale of people, weaponry, and productive capacity involved—is its fundamentally ideological, almost spiritual, nature. There’s no hatred like odium theologicum, the special animus directed at an opposing worldview.

But while these systems of thought are inimical to one another, a “clash of civilizations” was never inevitable: It only appears unavoidable now because of the specific people who have risen to power and the ideologies they’ve developed and come to inhabit.

Whither Europe?

Quite where this leaves Europe is unclear. Unless the European continent manages to counter the rise of the far-right at home—worryingly, a recent poll shows that the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is now Germany’s most popular party—Europe risks being swept up in a U.S.-Russia “spiritual union” under Trump and Putin.

Joining (economic) forces with China, as China itself has suggested in the wake of Trump’s tariffs, will be difficult given China’s professed “no-limits friendship” with Russia and its wider system of governance—though perhaps a pragmatist like von der Leyen will turn a blind eye to some of the issues and concentrate on trade and commerce instead; as The Economist notes, an EU-wide “rebalancing” may be in the works. Spain’s prime minister Pedro Sanchez’ proposed “pivot to China,” as Bloomberg describes it, with a visit to Beijing in the wake of the Trump tariffs, is a hint in this direction.

What seems clear is that we now inhabit a world of increasingly antagonistic ideological formations and geopolitical rivalries, with multiple possible configurations in the time ahead. The Fukuyamite hypothesis has most definitely been falsified: History is far from over, and a number of potential confrontations are now on the horizon. In this context, a Europe that (metaphorically) soldiers on alone—freed from a far-right “fifth column” at home, and managing to stave off Trump’s global MAGA machinations—seems increasingly like the sanest of outcomes. Whether that will be enough to sustain the better parts of liberal democracy in the long run remains to be seen.

The philosopher Hegel once described observing Napoleon riding out from the town of Jena after battling the Prussian army. On horseback, Napoleon, “this world-soul,” in Hegel’s words, was a “wonderful sensation to see.” The conquering French statesman seemed to embody history itself, an overwhelming force “concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse,” who, Hegel wrote, “reaches out over the world and masters it.”

When Trump strode out onto the stage in the Rose Garden—soon reportedly to be paved over, like in a Joni Mitchell song— to announce his “Liberation Day” tariffs on April 2nd, he, too, seemed to embody the zeitgeist of an age: resentful, nationalistic, ludicrous, willing to apply punitive measures against everything from penguin-inhabited islands to the world’s second-biggest economy. This was indeed a (perverse) “world-soul” appearing before a stunned global audience. Concentrated in a single point, the empirical person of Donald J. Trump wielded a terrifying, Napoleonic power, channeled through what may have been an LLM-generated, but at any rate deeply irrational, formula, aimed at taking a wrecking ball to the world economy.

For unlike the 2008 financial crisis, whose causes were structural, multifaceted, and complex, the April 2025 market meltdown can be traced to the misguided actions of a single individual—aided, of course, by a handful of advisers, like Peter Navarro. Remarkably, this present moment has its origin—to an unprecedented degree in the annals of modern finance—in a single person.

It might therefore seem easier to undo the damage. But even if Trump were to reverse the tariffs tomorrow, markets and nations have memories. The blow Trump has dealt to the global economy consists in the “extreme uncertainty that we're creating,” as economist Paul Krugman has described it. Even if stock markets do regain their losses, and volatility declines, Trump has shown his willingness to “go nuclear” on trade and the global economy. And so one might reasonably ask: What's to stop him from doing so again? While we may not get a full “Trumpcession”—though with news of a U.S.-China trade war ramping up, who can tell?—a certain amount of rot has surely been implanted in economic affairs.

Disengage and Decouple

More broadly, the Trump tariffs have only further accelerated what we might think of as the “Great American Decoupling,” which was under way even before his tariffs announcement: Trump’s apparent “pivot to Russia,” his view that the U.S. might not come to NATO members’ aid, and his earlier threats to annex Greenland, Canada, the Panama Canal, and the Gaza Strip, have all helped turn allies into skeptics, if not outright adversaries, and transformed a hegemon into something of a pariah.

Well before this current crisis—which is to say, in our time-warped, “flood the zone” reality, a mere few weeks ago—the New York Times reported on a “growing number of Europeans, Canadians and others who are forgoing American goods” to express their opposition to Trump’s foreign policy stance. Now, after the tariffs announcement, consumers in Denmark, to take just one example, are redoubling their boycott of American goods. European products are being labeled with star-shaped stickers in one major Copenhagen supermarket, which serves the dual function of helping consumers avoid American-made goods. There’s even a Danish-language Facebook group encouraging members to “boycott goods from the USA,” which currently has around 95,000 members.

Consumer boycotts are one striking example of how the world is decoupling from the U.S. economy. But there are other changes under way as well.

In Germany, conservative politicians have called for the country to bring a significant proportion of its gold reserves back from the U.S.—currently, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York holds German gold worth €113 billion, more than a third of the country’s reserve. A symbolic right-wing populist stunt, extending back to 2012 when a similar proposal was made, it’s nevertheless likely to be met with more support this time around. “The very idea that [the gold] might not be safe would have been considered ridiculous from 1945 ... until a couple of weeks ago,” POLITICO notes.

Meanwhile, in Norway, echoing wider European concerns about whether the US could “switch off Europe’s weapons,” some have worried that the U.S. might be able to disable the Norway’s fleet of more than fifty U.S.-made F-35 fighter jets; defense experts reassured Norwegian readers that the U.S. likely did not possess a “big red button” with which to paralyze the jets, but also noted that without full U.S. support, the planes would likely only be able to fly for a few months before being grounded, thanks to a near-total reliance on American-made spare parts and weapons systems. Even to ask these questions is suggestive of how far the fundamentals have changed since Trump’s January 20th inauguration.

Another sign of decoupling is the plummeting rate of arriving foreign visitors to the United States. “The number of foreigners passing through customs at the 10 busiest U.S. airports fell by over 20% year over year toward late March,” Axios reports. Several European countries have issued travel advisories. Multiple countries are warnings its transgender citizens to exercise caution when traveling to America. More anecdotally, looking around academia today, I’m hard pressed to find anyone seriously considering traveling to the U.S. for an academic conference as long as Trump remains in the White House: Many perceive that it’s simply not safe to do so.

As U.S. academics look for work elsewhere, including renowned scholars of fascism like Jason Stanley and Timothy Snyder, non-U.S. academics are increasingly shying away from the country as well, driven by a spate of troubling stories about border control, but also the Trump administration’s campaign against academic freedom aimed at quashing dissent—from ICE’s arrest of former Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil to Homeland Security agents’ arrest of Tufts doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk. American universities have long been the envy of the world, but the risks now seem needlessly large.

Naturally, tariffs have upended trading relationships as well. Only four days after the tariffs proclamation, British carmaker Jaguar Land Rover announced that it would no longer be exporting its cars across the Atlantic. China has said that it is limiting exports of four key rare-earth minerals, “squeezing supply to the West of minerals used to make weapons, electronics and a range of consumer goods.” And doubtless there are thousands of manufacturers around the world who are now reassessing their trade plans.

Trump’s big gamble is that these setbacks will be temporary as producers relocate manufacturing to the U.S. instead. But homeshoring takes time. It’s also unclear who would work in these (alleged) new manufacturing plants: U.S. unemployment currently sits at 4.2 percent, a relatively low level, so there isn’t a huge amount of available labor sitting around. And if investors feel that Trump’s America is a chaotic, unruly place to do business, where the basic ground rules can be overturned with a tweet, why would they invest their capital there rather than in, say, Europe or East Asia?

The Prodigal Land

Remarkably, America’s decoupling from the world isn’t the work of geopolitical adversaries hoping to knock the world’s policeman down a peg or two, or radicals looking to settle scores with U.S. imperialism. Instead, the country is being undermined by its very own political leadership. As Paul Krugman said recently of tariffs more specifically, “If you wanted to kill U.S. exceptionalism, this is kind of what you would do.”

It goes without saying that none of this is a good thing, neither for the world nor for the U.S. Despite its troubling foreign-policy record, with a lower-bound estimate of 3.6 million indirect deaths just from its post-9/11 wars, according to Brown University’s Costs of War project, the American economy is a powerhouse, its cultural products enjoyed by billions, and its universities admired by scholars and scientists around the globe.

If America is retreating into itself, and the world is pulling back from its exuberant irrationalities under Trump 2.0, that same world surely stands ready to accept it once again, albeit on much improved terms, under some more sensible leadership in the future. Perhaps some day in the not-too-distant future, the world will re-welcome an America that, like the prodigal son, was “dead and is alive again, and was lost and is found.”

The choice will largely lie with the American people themselves.

Arlie Russell Hochschild (2024). Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right. The New Press.

Why do people continue to vote for Trump?

Arlie Hochschild is an eminent Berkeley sociologist with half a century’s worth of experience, having invented key concepts like “emotional labor” in a 1983 study of service work, The Managed Heart, and the notion of a “second shift”—the domestic labor that is (still) disproportionately performed by women. More recently, Hochschild has published a 2016 study of the Tea Party movement, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, based on observations and interviews in Louisiana.

Now Hochschild has moved north. With Stolen Pride, Hochschild applies her signature brand of empathetic ethnography to try to disentangle the knot of Trump’s enduring appeal.

Zooming in on an especially rural and red slice of America, Kentucky’s 5th congressional district and its constituent Pike County, Hochschild tries to unpack the mentalities and emotions underpinning Trump’s appeal in the region (and beyond). In the district we encounter here, KY-5, described by some as the “heart of Appalachia,” Trump won around 80 percent of the vote in all three of the last presidential elections. One way of thinking about Stolen Pride is as a kind of Hillbilly Elegy for the liberal intelligentsia, a Thomas Frank-style What’s the Matter with Kansas?, transplanted two states over and less economically, more culturally, oriented.

Good and Bad Bullies

The results, unfortunately, are mixed. Stolen Pride’s insistently restrictive framing of Pike County’s political psychology as that of a contest between “shame” and “pride,” brings to mind an amusing scene from the movie Donnie Darko, where one of the characters, a teacher, presents an idiosyncratic theory that all of life is a contest between “fear” and “love”—in other words, a reductive framing that misses much else of relevance.

In Stolen Pride, readers are told repeatedly that the fundamental problem facing eastern Kentuckians, and by extension Trump supporters in other (somewhat) economically backward areas, is one of a lack of pride and an excess of shame. They are unable to take pride in their economically depressed, coal-abandoned regions; they have been shamed for their refusal to adopt progressive cultural values, and they have been left pride-less by the machinations of “globalization.”

Enter Donald Trump, the book suggests, who alone has shown himself able to restore their pride and take away their shame. He is the “good bully” (p. 205), from the perspective of MAGA voters, willing to protect Kentuckians from the “bad bully”—a shadowy quadrumvirate made up of “the Democratic Party, CNN, the federal government (apart from the military), and the defenders of urban America who rudely dismiss rural America” (p. 206). End of story, more or less.

Narrative and Reality

But Hochschild never considers why key signifiers like “pride” and “shame” get freighted with the meaning they do: Why does pride in this region automatically entail “independence from government authority,” as one of her interviewees reports (p. 150)? Why does “shame” emanate from the closure of coal mines lying decades in the past when the rest of the postindustrialized world has moved on and become, precisely, postindustrial? And why wasn’t it Biden instead who was able to appear to these residents as the good “bully” (if we are to accept this schoolyard metaphor as meaningful way of thinking about high-stakes politics), who stood up to the bad “bully” Trump—a seemingly much more resonant, sensible framing from the left-liberal standpoint?

The basic problem with Stolen Pride is that Hochschild, by and large, doesn’t attend to the political and social activation of feeling as a “mass emotion,” steered and shaped by political actors and the media. Historians sometimes call this memory politics—in other words, how consciousness of the past is shaped and activated by political actors. And while there’s a great deal of shared memory and nostalgia on display in Stolen Pride, there is rather less reflexive questioning of the memory politics involved in propelling certain narrative strands to the forefront of the public mind.

In fact, right-wing politicians are left with very little communicative agency at all in this book: All they can do, seemingly, is to capture and project, bullhorn-style, the public’s preexisting feelings, uncovered at ground level. Trump and the vast communicative ecosystem surrounding him are not only strangely lacking in independent powers to persuade and give shape to public opinion, but are simply missing in action here, essentially nowhere to be found in the pages of Stolen Pride.

When Hochschild asks her interviewees about “the right’s deep story,” or overarching meta-narrative, she does not stop to consider who might be the storyteller in this saga. Who concocted and spread the “deep story”? Surely not eastern Kentuckians alone. When Hochschild implicitly asks us, as readers, to reflect upon the allure of Trump as “the good bully,” against the “bigger and badder” bullies of the “Democratic Party and the federal government,” the only appropriate response seems to be that of the very consternation Hochschild reports among her friends on the left:

Who was the first bully? . . . Wasn’t Joe Biden’s Build Back Better bill giving good jobs to people nationwide?

Indeed. There’s a “deep story” liberal-minded people could tell about a state like Kentucky as well—one in which the state’s economy is doing reasonably well, unemployment remains relatively low (5.2% statewide in December 2024, “lower than the state’s almost-50-year historical average of 6.5 percent,” as a recent policy brief notes), and where Andy Beshear, a Democrat, was able to capture the governorship in 2019— a fact which Hochschild alludes to in the concluding chapter but leaves largely unanalyzed.

We shouldn’t, of course, blame the messenger: Clearly, it isn’t Hochschild’s fault that her informants have bought into the lie of the 2020 “stolen election” or, more generally, hold reactionary views. And it isn’t the job of ethnographers, for the most part, to condemn their subjects.

But Hochschild does insist on Explaining Trumpism—behind this book’s pretense at anthropological particularity, it remains a sweeping argument about cultural driving forces in U.S. politics, concealed as fine-grained journalism. In her framing, Hochschild lends symbolic authority to ideas about “pride” and “shame” that are themselves the products of Trump’s own messaging. While Hochschild’s demand-sided account repeatedly suggests that there is an organic appetite for resentment in the population, a more supply-sided theory would recognize that the art of late-modern politics is about the creation and activation of resentments.

Hochschild doesn’t make room for this other half of the equation. In Stolen Pride, the author presents a micro-level view, without pausing to ask how narratives filter down from above and transform the view from below. Trump’s MAGA makeover of the American political landscape was the result of a relentless communicative bombardment, at all levels of the media ecosystem, from tweets and Truths to Fox & Friends. Hugging the ground provides only a partial glimpse of this wider story.

What Winning Takes

For Democrats to win elections in red states like Kentucky, one might think it would be enough to promise more economic populism and stronger reconstruction programs, including Ezra Klein-style abundance policies, as the historian Rutger Bregman has recently argued. Hochschild’s book also veers onto this ground, if not in so many words. If the central problem is that coal jobs have disappeared (inducing shame), the solution might seem to be to bring back jobs (producing pride).

The trouble is that both Biden and Harris already promised and pursued this sort of agenda to a significant degree. Biden secured $1.6 trillion in green and infrastructure spending; and while Bidenomics was hampered by the failure to pass Build Back Better, spin-off legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Act were clear attempts to strengthen the economic base. Harris’s 2024 campaign—though more moderate than her 2020 primary run when Harris supported more radical, sweeping legislation like Medicare for All—still promised around $5 trillion in tax increases over a decade aimed at corporations and the wealthy.

Clearly, this is not yesterday’s neoliberalism. Democrats learned from Trump 1.0, but also Bernie Sanders’s popular 2016 presidential campaign.

What Democrats couldn’t properly contend with was the toxic, decade-long MAGA-fueled inculcation of nativist, reactionary narratives that obscured their economic record and set tens of millions of Americans on a direct collision course with basic humanist values.

Perhaps this is a form of “stolen pride” Hochschild could give a hearing in future work: The once-proud belief in a uniquely American dynamism, driven by immigration and diversity; and pride in the country’s liberal-democratic values, from “checks and balances” to the right not to be abducted by plainclothes agents in broad daylight or deported to an offshore supermax prison without cause.

Yes, these ideals were always in part illusory: Internally a fractured and imperfect democracy, the U.S. was and is also an aggressive overseas imperial power. (Read Stephen Kinzer’s The Brothers for a capsule view of the postwar record, seen through the actions of John Foster and Alan Dulles.)

But both Americans and the wider world are coming to discover just how much even those purported values will be missed as they fade from view. It’s a sorrowful tale of something of great value that has been taken away from the world.

Millions of people are ashamed, too, to return to Hochschild’s parlance, that these things are now being stolen from them.

Reclaiming Narrative Hegemony

Shame isn’t necessarily all bad. Longing for the Confederacy’s defense of slavery, for instance, ought to induce a sense of shame. Part of the left’s cultural-hegemonic work must be to ensure that xenophobia, misogyny and other reactionary positions do in fact engender a proper sense of loathing—the sense that this sort of thing simply isn’t done. One could call this “identity politics” or “wokeism”; in other words, basic civility and humanism.

As the right cements its grip on power around the world, there’s a growing realization that the left needs to win the narrative war. Hearts and minds are being shaped daily by people like Joe Rogan and on platforms like TikTok and X. The left lacks its own counter-messaging apparatus attuned to these times. The cultural momentum has been lost.

What’s needed now is to reclaim lost cultural ground, build new narratives, and counteract the right’s successful messaging. Unfortunately, Stolen Pride, with its partial view and restrictive framing, offers little guidance for what comes next.

The promise of Artificial (General) Intelligence is the greatest hype bubble this side of the new millennium.

Huge checks are being cashed on the promise of AI’s profitability. The chip manufacturer Nvidia currently has a market cap of 3 trillion dollars, making it the second-most valuable company in the world. Its bloated valuation stems in large part from the ongoing AI revolution, which has sent demand for graphics-processing chips like those made by Nvidia soaring. Meanwhile, OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, was valued at an astonishing $340 billion in early 2025. And there’s little sign that investments in the technology are letting up. Four tech titans—Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft—plan on pouring more than $300 billion into AI in 2025 alone. Clearly, there’s lots of loose capital floating around for those willing and able to get aboard the AI hype train.

But beyond the bloated market caps and overinflated investment drives—no different in essence from past speculative bubbles, from Dutch tulips to dotcom startups in the Y2K era, the“irrational exuberance” of stock overvaluation, in Alan Greenspan’s memorable phrase—a growing chorus is asking: Where is the value in AI, both in the narrow economic and wider social sense?

So far at least, the AI revolution has been characterized by two countervailing tendencies: on the one hand, an enormous willingness to invest in the booming AI industry (fueled in part by the fear of being “left behind”), and, on the other hand, extremely meager returns in any substantive, meaningful sense of that term. As the Boston Consulting Group noted last October, tackling the narrower financial meaning, “After all the hype over artificial intelligence (AI), the value is hard to find.”

Is AI making us more productive? Is it resulting in better-quality outputs? Is it solving real-world problems at a scale and with a degree of accuracy and quality commensurate with its significant energy usage and fiscal investments?

The answer to all of those questions, in my opinion, is no, and is likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. As the economist Daron Acemoglu has argued, AI’s productivity contribution will likely be no more than 0.5 percent in total over the next decade. “I don’t think we should belittle 0.5 percent in 10 years,” Acemoglu has said. “That’s better than zero. But it’s just disappointing relative to the promises that people in the industry and in tech journalism are making.” And it’s particularly disappointing given the trillions of dollars and hundreds of terawatt-hours AI-driven industries aim to absorb in the years ahead. As ever, we need to ask about opportunity costs: What might humanity have accomplished were these resources used differently?

By now, the Internet is chock-full of stories of how AI has failed to deliver in a social, less economic, sense. One basic issue is that of generative AI’s proneness to error. LLMs struggle with truth and with correspondences between text and reality. Hallucinations aren’t incidental to LLMs—they’re inherent. Hallucinations aren’t contingent bugs to be ironed out in some future iteration, given “better” data (but from where?): They’re an ontological, or necessary, feature of the tech involved.

Now, humans left to their own devices will always commit errors, and the tolerance for errors is itself variable: The range of acceptable error differs significantly for an AI (or a human) when writing a college term paper, say, or helping land a passenger jet, or detecting cancerous growths. Still, we may soon inhabit a Brazil-like world of half-broken technologies always in need of (impossible) repairs: In Terry Gilliam’s absurdist 1985 movie Brazil, we confront a dystopian future in which nothing works the way it ought to, its futuristic infrastructure held together by little more than duct tape, anarchic subterfuge, and a semi-resigned willingness to accept catastrophic error as a built-in feature of daily life.

Catastrophic errors, confidently pronounced, are likely to become our future as well. Last year, a Purdue study found that ChatGPT provided erroneous answers to programming questions in 52% of cases. What happens once those errors find their way into our society’s basic infrastructure?

More comically, I was recently scolded by ChatGPT for claiming that Donald Trump was president of the United States: “Trump is no longer in office,” the large-language model cheerily pronounced. But hallucinations are no laughing matter: They’re already having real-world consequences. A Norwegian man recently filed a complaint demanding that OpenAI be fined after ChatGPT erroneously claimed that he had murdered his own children. What if someone had acted on those mistaken claims? An Australian passenger traveling to Chile was recently told by ChatGPT that he would not need a visa to enter the country (“You can enter visa-free”), which was wrong.

In academia—a world that, at least in theory, revolves around the distinction between truth and falsehood—the effects are becoming particularly noticeable. University libraries are being overrun by students in search of fictitious sources— books and articles that simply do not exist—that have been recommended to them by chatbots. Worryingly, Los Alamos National Laboratory, which conducts research on sensitive technologies, had to warn its users against the threat of fake citations, including the “higher chance” of encountering “‘ghost’ or ‘hallucinated’ references” in published works. Back in January 2023, I called this AI’s propensity to produce “credible nonsense”—that is, plausible-sounding outputs with little or no connection to really-existing reality.

More of what we read, including scientific publications, is increasingly shot through with AI-generated content. Here, for instance, is a book chapter published by Springer containing three instances of the ChatGPT-derived phrase “Certainly! Here is the translated text,” likely pasted directly from the platform’s prompt—just a tiny example of how LLM-speak filters its way into the intellectual sphere. Princeton University academics last year tried to assess Wikipedia’s proportion of AI-generated articles and arrived at an estimate of around 5 percent. Estimates of this kind will always be uncertain because of the essential camouflage of LLM-ed output, but it seems likely that the level of AI-written content will only increase. Worryingly, a Columbia Journalism Review-affiliated study found that AI platforms provided erroneous sources in more than 60 percent of the researchers’ queries. The CJR’s piece was titled, simply, “AI Search Has A Citation Problem.” Moreover, this error-proneness is a danger to AI itself: As LLMs begin to “ingest” synthetic but mistake-riddled outputs as part of their training data, the result may be be an “unintentional feedback loop” of ever-worsening outputs, as one researcher wrote in the New York Times last year.

Growing evidence suggests that AI will have ruinous effects on already deteriorating powers of concentration, reading, writing, and thinking. The “loss of decision-making” as younger generations increasingly come to rely on AI could plausibly cause a reduction in overall human intelligence.

The key issue is that we essentially hone our intelligence by engaging in intelligence-demanding activities; but AI reduces our need to do so (so-called cognitive offloading), and so, the chance to develop basic skills like wading through lengthy writings, summarizing lectures or reading materials, and writing unaided by technology. AI could be useful for older generations who have already developed the requisite skills but will likely wreak havoc on younger people’s cognitive capacities—and the world they will ultimately create and inhabit.

But in the near-term, the real risks from the AI hype bubble are financial, which is to say structural to the world economy. As the venture capital firm Sequoia Capital’s analyst David Cahn reiterated last summer: “Where is all the revenue?”. While Cahn had found that by late 2023, AI industries would have had to generate $200 billion in revenues, by the end of 2024, $200-billion-dollar question had now become “AI’s $600B question.” While Cahn ultimately believed “it will be worthwhile” and that “speculative frenzies are part of technology, and so they are not something to be afraid of,” others are not so bullish.

Ali Baba’s Joe Tsai recently warned of an AI data center construction bubble: Centers are being built en masse with an unclear customer base. Similarly, the billionaire investor Roy Dalio likened “investor exuberance over artificial intelligence” to the “build-up to the dotcom bust at the turn of the millennium,” the FT reported earlier this year. As an essay in The American Prospect on “bubble trouble” notes, “If the AI bubble bursts, it not only threatens to wipe out VC firms in the Valley but also blow a gaping hole in the public markets and cause an economy-wide meltdown.”

That’s a big “if,” of course. But the question is worth asking more forcefully than it has been so far. With hundreds of billions of dollars in AI investments slated for the next few years, there will have to be significant returns lest the hype bubble burst, leaving governments and the public to foot the bill for the inevitable post-implosion cleanup. Sleepwalking into a hype-driven meltdown just doesn’t seem very intelligent.

In mid-March, Trump surprised his political opponents by rejecting a series of last-minute presidential pardons signed by his predecessor Joe Biden, including those, in Trump’s menacing language, offered to “the Unselect Committee of Political Thugs, and many others.”

Posting on Truth Social, Trump declared that Biden’s pardons were “VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OF EFFECT.” As his presidency drew to a close, Biden offered a series of pardons, starting on December 1st with his son, Hunter Biden, and ending in a last-minute series of clemencies on January 19th, including Anthony Fauci, General Mark Miller, members of Congress serving on the Select Committee investigating the January 6 Attack, as well as members of Biden’s immediate family.

It was unclear which of Biden’s multiple pardoning rounds Trump was calling into question. But in so doing, Trump was undermining an executive practice enshrined in the Constitution and first used by George Washington in his 1795 amnesty for two participants in the Whiskey Rebellion who had been sentenced to death by hanging. Trump’s no doubt legally flawed argument hinged on the idea that Biden’s pardons were invalid because they “were done by Autopen,” a technology used by multiple presidents, allowing documents to be signed “auomatically” without the person’s physical presence. “In other words,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, “Joe Biden did not sign them but, more importantly, he did not know anything about them!”.

The “Autopen argument” drew on a Heritage Foundation report by The Oversight Project, published a week earlier and publicized by Fox News, though its roots appear to go back to 2011 when Republicans challenged Obama’s use of the device to sign legislation. “WHOEVER CONTROLLED THE AUTOPEN CONTROLLED THE PRESIDENCY,” the Heritage Foundation’s project announced on X. “We gathered every document we could find with Biden's signature over the course of his presidency. All used the same autopen signature except for the the [sic] announcement that the former President was dropping out of the race last year.” A week later, this claim was absorbed by the U.S. president. In a further Truth Social post, he announced: “The person who was the real President during the Biden years was the person who controlled the Autopen!”.

The Autopen argument seemed to allow Trump to accomplish three things: First, to further debase the reputation of the Biden presidency and reinforce the idea of a doddering 46th absentee president, one not in command of himself or the country, and subject to (potentially nefarious) external influences. Second, to send a signal to Trump’s political enemies that they might find themselves the targets of (political) prosecution (or rather, persecution). Sans protective pardons, Trump could instruct the Justice Department to begin investigating people like Fauci, which would likely be met with acclaim by Trump’s MAGA base. But third, the Autopen argument also seemed to allow Trump to preserve intact the presidential power to grant clemency, which might come in handy later in Trump’s second term, since Trump’s claims focused on a limited episode, not on the wholesale power to pardon as such.

But at least Trump recognized that the final word on Biden’s late-stage pardons would not be his:

“It’s not my decision — that’ll be up to a court — but I would say that they’re null and void, because I’m sure Biden didn’t have any idea that it was taking place, and somebody was using an auto pen to sign off and to give pardons,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on Sunday night.

So how likely is it that Trump’s charge would come into effect? Not very. As Bloomberg notes, a 2024 federal appeals court ruled that a “pardon doesn’t even have to be in writing.” The idea that an Autopen signature (and all seven Biden “warrants” from January 19th 2025 appear to bear the same, identical signature) would invalidate highly publicized pardons is legally laughable.

The Executive’s Privilege

In the February 2024 case referenced by Bloomberg, Rosemond v. Hudgins, a convicted drug trafficker, James Rosemond, serving multiple life sentences, claimed that Trump had granted him clemency in the course of several phone calls with his supporters: Trump had allegedly said that he “want[ed] to do this,” that he “want[ed] this expedited right away,” and finally that he wanted to “get this guy home for Christmas.” There was, however, nothing in writing, the Court of Appeals judge noted—no “warrant of commutation relating to Rosemond.” Rosemond’s lawyers claimed there didn’t have to be: The president’s verbal expression of clemency was enough.

Here the court agreed in principle (though without any practical consequences for Rosemond), and reaffirmed two basic ideas underpinning presidential pardons:

First, absent a constitutional constraint, the President's ability to commute a sentence is not subject to any further formal limits or requirements. Second, the Judiciary's role in the matter of executive commutations is very sharply circumscribed.

From the first principle, the court declared that pardons don’t even have to be written down; if asked whether pardons must be in writing, “the answer is undoubtedly no. The plain language of the Constitution imposes no such limit.”

From the second principle, namely that a presidential pardon belongs to the president and not the courts—“it is the President's prerogative to exercise it, not the Judiciary’s”—the court affirmed its reluctance to intervene:

We have no authority to fill the gap between President Trump's alleged desire to commute Rosemond's sentence on December 18 and his apparent failure to follow through with that intent in the final month of his presidency

Considering this ruling, we can see what thin ice Trump is on, legally speaking, in trying to overturn the Biden pardons. The exact nature of the signature, whether manually produced or the result of an Autopen, seems wholly immaterial; if it doesn’t even matter whether the pardons are written down, why should the exact nature of the signature matter? Moreover, a court is highly unlikely to overturn a presidential pardon once proffered, precisely because the power to pardon resides with the president, not the courts, albeit with some limitations (e.g. presidents don’t have the power to commute violations of state law; pardons are backward-looking and cannot “immunize future criminal conduct”). Trump’s understanding of the law surrounding presidential pardons appears slipshod.

Broadcasting and Battling

In this case, then, the courts are likely to “hold the line” against Trump’s inherent authoritarian instincts, and he is unlikely to be able to overturn Biden’s pardons. While Trump may still pursue a legal witch hunt against these (real or perceived) political opponents, he will not be able to do so through this route.

But as is so often the case with Trump, the messaging effect is far more important than the actual—in this case, legal—outcome. It signals his willingness to persecute his enemies and relays his tireless efforts to appease the MAGA base. Trump likely knows he won’t get anywhere on the Biden pardons. But he received tens of thousands of likes on social media, and reinforced the narrative of a weak Democratic predecessor. More importantly, the “Autopen affair” also joins a number of other actions that are wearing down a key bulwark against Trump’s incipient fascist authoritarianism: the court system.

Over the weekend, the White House ordered the deportation of hundreds of alleged Venezuelan gang members to an El Salvador prison, run by the crypto-fascist government of Nayib Bukele. The courts tried to intervene, but it was too little, too late. As the BBC reported, “A federal judge's order prevented the Trump administration from invoking a centuries-old wartime law to justify some of the deportations, but the flights had already departed.” Or as Bukele himself wrote tauntingly on X, “Oopsie… Too late 😂.”

It’s clear that the Trump administration, which in recent weeks has attacked higher education, now has its sights set on the legal system.

Bulwarks—or Compliance?

Both the Autopen affair and El Salvadorean deportation raise the deeper question of whether the courts are a reliable bulwark against Trumpist authoritarianism. Much now seems to hang on the courts and their capacity to resist Trump’s agenda.

Liberal democrats have long placed their faith in the rules-based order of the Rechstaat. For centuries, (lowercase-r) republicanism has emphasized the importance of the “rule of law” and, relatedly, the courts’ capacity to withstand a winner-takes-all politics, ensure procedural fairness, protect vulnerable minorities, and uphold legal rights against an overweening executive. Liberal democrats tend to see judges as buffers against strongmen and authoritarians of all stripes; and there can be little doubt that courts have, historically, played an important role in defending and upholding the rule of law. Just as fascists love to attack college campuses for their role as sites of ideological resistance, the courts are an important source of procedural resistance, threatening to obstruct executive authority by throwing grit into the machinery of power, which makes them a privileged target of authoritarian action.

But courts, being among the favorite targets of authoritarians, are also flimsy institutions, and they are receptive to the wider social context in which they act. The GOP and Trump have already packed the Supreme Court with right-wing justices: Republican appointees are now in a 6-3 majority. At lower levels, Trump appointed more than 200 federal judges in his first term, “including nearly as many powerful federal appeals court judges in four years as Barack Obama appointed in eight.” State supreme courts have also been “flipped” by Republicans through a decades-long process. Importantly, too, courts and the judges that lead them are embedded in a broader societal and political context. Courts are sites of ideological contestation and action, and are swayed by that context, over above who appointed whom to serve on the judicial bench.

In a landmark 1957 article, the political scientist Robert Dahl noted that the United States Supreme Court was both a legal and a political institution. By this Dahl meant, among other things, that the Court, except for “short-lived transitional periods,” would “inevitably [be] a part of the dominant national alliance” and “suppor[t] the major policies of the alliance.” Crucially, Dahl observes, “by itself, the Court is almost powerless to affect the course of national policy.” Meanwhile, in his (admittedly controversial) 1991 book, Hollow Hope, Gerald Rosenberg questioned whether the U.S. Supreme Court could be a reliable source of progressive social change. And as the critical legal studies scholar and Harvard professor Roberto M. Unger observed, while many affirm the “institutional competence” of the courts, there are good reasons to question it:

Most of what courts actually do—brokering small deals against a background of disputed facts and uncontested though vaguely conceived rights and supervising the police and prosecutors as they decide which violent members of the underclass to imprison, hardly fits those conceptions of institutional competence.

That is not to say, again, that courts cannot uphold the rule of law in crucial ways. Moreover, whether courts can withstand a wider authoritarian turn is a complex, and ultimately empirical, question. In the book, Can Courts be Bulwarks of Democracy?, Jeffrey Staton and his colleagues argue that U.S. democracy can likely be safeguarded by the courts, particularly if judges are willing to bear the risk of “non-compliance” and that which is “politically unpopular,” and if, conversely, civil society punishes political leaders who themselves exhibit non-compliance with court decisions. Of all the factors favoring courts upholding liberal democracy, the “presence of brave judges who are willing to exercise their powers is the most likely one to be met,” they write. The authors also suggest a strong civil society, “committed to advocating on behalf of courts, their judges, and judicial independence,” will likely contribute to standing the test of executive overreach.

Probing the Legal Order

No doubt Trump and his administration are testing the courts now, probing for weaknesses to exploit. To undermine the courts further through rhetoric or analysis would, in some ways, be to do the Trump administration's bidding. Still, the warnings offered by such intellectual movements as the Critical Legal Studies school against an overly exuberant faith in the court system to effect political change—or resist its reactionary subversion—remain salutary.

At the end of the day, courts are to some degree beholden to executive authority. The U.S. president wields astonishing power to change facts on the ground, often well before courts can react and respond, as illustrated by the recent El Salvador debacle: The New York Times rightly described the deportation and subsequent dismissal of a federal judge’s ruling as the Trump administration moving “one large step closer to a constitutional showdown with the judicial branch of government.” Trump is practically trolling the court system, goading it into provocation and a confrontation he likely believes he stands a good chance of winning.

But while many are right to continue to place their hope in the power of the courts to dampen Trump’s authoritarianism, only a mass mobilization of civil society at the grassroots level can shore up the courts and the liberal-democratic rights they, at their best, uphold. As jurisprudential theory and the sociology of law suggest, judges are responsive to ideological pressures, both from above—and below.

Judges are also unlikely to be able to go it alone. Only a popular mass movement, resisting both the dehumanization of out-groups and the extreme concentration of power in the hands of a single leader, can ensure the survival of liberal-democratic practices—for a democracy without people out in the streets, protesting and organizing, is likely to be a flimsy thing indeed.

Yanis Varoufakis (2023). Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. Vintage.

Eva Dou (2025). House of Huawei: Inside the Secret World of China's Most Powerful Company. Portfolio.

Yanis Varoufakis’s much-touted Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism is essentially built atop hyperbole: Varoufakis subscribes to the peculiar thesis that “capitalism is now dead.” By this he means that “its dynamics no longer govern our economies”—and while that takes some unpacking, in essence Varoufakis appears to believe that capitalism has now been “replaced by something fundamentally different”: the titular technofeudalism.

On Varoufakis’s view, rent (a notoriously ambiguous term) has replaced profits and markets have been replaced by digital platforms. Instead of profit, in the form of skimmed-off surplus value from wage-laborers, our new captains of industry, the techno-oligarchs, seek to extract “cloud rent,” a “form of rent that must be paid for access” to digital platforms, “and to the cloud more broadly.” Varoufakis deploys a cloud-heavy terminology: “Cloudalists” vie for control over “cloud fiefs” in order to exploit “cloud serfs,” aiming to build up their stocks of “cloud capital.” For as we go about our digital lives, Varoufakis thinks we are all playing the role of feudal-style serfs:

The most valuable part of the stock of cloud capital is not its physical components but rather the stories posted on Facebook, the videos uploaded to TikTok and YouTube, the photos on Instagram, the jokes and insults on Twitter, the reviews on Amazon or, simply, our movement through space, allowing our phones to alert Google Maps to the latest spot of traffic. In providing these stories, videos, photos, jokes and movements, it is we who produce and reproduce – outside any market – the stock of cloud capital.

One could just as easily flip the argument around and say that all the posts, texts, images, and videos flooding digital platforms would be economically worthless without capital. It isn’t content that makes capital, but capital that turns so many signs into “content,” which is to say, the capitalization of the symbolic. While it’s true that Meta would effectively go bankrupt if we all stopped posting on Facebook and deleted our accounts, it takes an awful lot of physical capital and labor to sustain the mediation of that content.

Varoufakis isn’t the first to have noticed the central role played by data or digital assets of various kinds under late-modern capitalism. Shoshana Zuboff emphasized the role of “behavioral surplus” in her 2019 bestseller, The Age of Surveillance Capital. Some academics have described the formation of an “asset economy.” Controlling the “vectors of information,” as McKenzie Wark has described them, is no doubt an increasingly important source of power and wealth.

But at their best, such analyses have been careful to note that data is just one piece of the overall puzzle of contemporary political economy; data may be important, but so too are the four billion tons of cement produced worldwide in 2024, to take just one example of capitalism’s continued hard material edge. While lots of people have written about notions like “information capitalism” or “digital capitalism,” rather fewer seem willing to write about cement capitalism, maybe because of a certain novelty-pursuing theory effect in the academic field, where analysts are always in search of the next new thing—a sensationalizing mechanism that tends to blow up phenomena disproportionate to their underlying reality. It’s all too easy for these theorists to forget that there have likely never been more industrial proletarians in the world than today; they just happen not to be, by and large, in the Global North.

Varoufakis’s overarching argument systematically undervalues the real materiality of still-existing capitalism, which certainly isn’t “all up in the cloud,” humming along in digital abstraction, but relies on physical infrastructure, from subsea fiberoptic cables to server parks, microchip foundries and computer factories. It ignores the huge amount of waged labor that is required to maintain even the digital infrastructure of “the cloud,” never mind the continuous industrial production that still takes place today, even in our “knowledge societies”; Meta alone employed nearly 75,000 full-time employees in 2024.

Varoufakis also seems to believe that while once upon a time capitalists cared only about profit maximization, our new digital overlords now seem more focused on market shares than profits as such—allegedly enough to have pushed us beyond capitalism. “The undermining of one capitalism’s core principles,” Varoufakis writes, that is, “the profit motive,” plays a major role in the supposed shift from capitalism to technofeudalism. But business historians have long known that maximizing market share and “throughput” have sometimes been far more important as guiding principles for capitalist enterprises than “the bottom line” as such. There’s nothing particularly postcapitalist about the prioritization of market share over profits: Market-share competition is just profit-seeking by other, more circuitous (and often necessary) means. The fact that many Silicon Valley enterprises have been able to forgo immediate profits, bankrolled by investors who take the long view, isn’t evidence of capitalism’s devolution into atavistic-yet-futuristic neofeudalism; if anything, it shows that smart capitalists are willing to delay immediate gratification for longer-term control and even greater profitability.

Varoufakis himself offers us the most succinct counter to his book’s core argument:

Is life under the cloudalists’ reign fundamentally different from living under capitalism? Are the cloudalists really so different from the capitalists that we need a newfangled term – technofeudalism – for the system we live in today? Why not just call it hyper-capitalism or platform capitalism?

Of course, Varoufakis goes on to answer the latter in the negative, though not very persuasively. But rebranding workers “cloud serfs” and capital “cloud capital,” or capitalism “technofeudalism,” does not a new mode of production or accumulation make. If anything, we’re more deeply embedded in capitalism than ever.

What Varoufakis does get right is his concern with the enormous concentration of power in the hands of a Silicon Valley owner-class. That’s worrying enough, and something we need to study and think about relentlessly in the age of Musk and Trump. But best leave feudalism out of it: It can only cloud our judgment.

* * *

If one wants to understand China’s economic rise since the new millennium, smartphones—and the networks and hardware they rely on—are not a bad place to start.

In the early 2000s, as 3G networks were being rolled out, China lagged far behind the West: The country didn’t launch its 3G networks until late 2009—more than six years after countries like the UK and Italy. Over the next decade and a half, however, China underwent rapid economic modernization, and by the time 5G technology matured, it had surged ahead of its Western competitors: By mid-2024, 5G connections accounted for more than 40 percent of all cell phone connections in China, compared with just 12 percent in France, and the country had roughly two and a half times more 5G base stations than the United States. If the smartphone is the beating artery of late capitalist modernity—the medium through which much of life is lived—China’s ascent to the world’s second-place economic power could plausibly be told through its transition from telecoms laggard to leader.

A key player in this transition is the controversial company Huawei, which has faced criticism for alleged links to Chinese human rights abuses in Xinjiang, security concerns over potential backdoors, its role in surveillance programs like the Great Firewall of China, and its business dealings in Iran, among other major issues raised.

Enter Eva Dou’s House of Huawei, a thorough, if at times plodding, journalistic account of how this once tiny electronics outfit rose from obscurity in the 1980s to become a global telecommunications giant by the 2010s, before being cut down to size by U.S. restrictions by the decade’s end.

House of Huawei is both a work of corporate history and a case study in political-economic policy. The Chinese state undoubtedly played a key role in Huawei’s rise, and the company’s controversial nature is indisputable, including extensive contracts in Xinjiang, where it participated in surveillance and control of the Uyghur minority population—part of a Chinese state crackdown which fifty-one UN member states declared to be “crimes against humanity.” Huawei also helped transformed the Beijing 2008 Olympics into one of the most heavily surveilled events in recent history.

Perhaps surprisingly, Huawei was at one point promoted by Western celebrities like Scarlett Johansson and Henry Cavill, who gladly posed with the P9 smartphone in 2016. Major universities like Stanford and Berkeley lined up to work with the company, before a moratorium was instated in the wake of intensified U.S.-China competition under Trump and Xi.

While China’s state-led growth model helped fuel Huawei’s rise, American neomercantilism—a term used by the political scientist Eric Helleiner in describing both China’s and Trump’s trade policies—also undoubtedly foreclosed Huawei’s rapid growth. As Dou observes in the book’s closing pages:

The US government has succeeded in halting Huawei’s rise. Huawei is no longer setting new sales records each year but is instead working to regain its 2020 levels. It is no longer expanding farther into the West but is instead defending its turf in emerging markets. The company has lost valuable R&D partnerships with US and European universities, which had helped drive its innovation.

Still, Huawei reported revenues of $118 billion in 2024, and U.S.-led actions against the company have hardly stopped it in its tracks entirely; its footprint in the Global South remains considerable, in part because of its affordable products. But Huawei certainly lacks the meteoric thrust it possessed only a decade ago.

As in the Global South, not all Western U.S. allies were equally enthusiastic about jumping on the anti-Huawei bandwagon. The European Union remains split, with only 11 out of 27 member states explicitly banning the company through the use of legal powers. In Britain, it wasn’t just that Brexit had made authorities hesitant to get embroiled in an economic dogfight with China, a key trading partner, even though it did eventually instate a 5G ban; the country also recognized the difficulties involved in establishing worthy competitors to Huawei:

One former senior British security official recalled a heated meeting at which a British minister demanded that they work harder with Five Eyes partners to build alternatives to Huawei. “What do you want me to do?” he said he retorted. “Do you want me to phone up Admiral Rogers at the NSA, or General Nakasone at the NSA, and say, ‘Do you fancy building a telco to rival Huawei?’

As Dou shows, launching Huawei onto the world stage took decades of investment, research, and development, propelled by government investments and support—a slow, steady expansion from its local foothold in Shenzhen to wider China and the world beyond. The story of Huawei, then, is also a tale of the hollowness of free-market ideals. Ours is an essentially neoliberal-and-neomercantile world: Trade and markets are continuously being forged and reforged by the state, often in illiberal ways.

Dou—a seasoned reporter for the Washington Post—notes that many industry insiders believe most forms of communication are already under some form of surveillance: “When AT&T conducted a survey of cybersecurity professionals in 2016, 64 percent said they did not expect to be able to have a private conversation on any device.” Given the nefarious power that control over telecoms hardware potentially offers states, Dou’s work prompts a reflection about the obverse side of the Huawei story, especially pertinent to global audiences after Trump 2.0’s apparent realignment with Putin: Should countries also be concerned about potential U.S. control over global telecommunications infrastructure?

One frequently invoked explanation among progressives for the resurgence of far-right politics in recent times is inflation: Prices rise, food and energy costs go up, mortgages become more expensive, wages don’t keep up, and, so the story goes, as a consequence, working- and middle-class voters begin casting about for a scapegoat to blame for their economic woes. In short, economic pain pushes ordinary people into the arms of the radical right.

So too with Germany’s recent Bundestag elections in which the far-right party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) secured more than 20 percent of the vote. Only hours after polls closed, the economist Isabella Weber wrote on social media: “75% of AfD voters say they are very worried that prices are rising so much that they can’t pay their bills. Inflation once more fueled the extreme right.”

Weber had invoked the same explanation in accounting for Trump’s successful presidential bid a few months earlier: Two weeks after the 2024 U.S. presidential election, the economist claimed that inflation was “clearly the most important question for voters.” In an interview with French media, Weber reiterated that “Trump's election shows that inflation is a danger to democracy.”

She was not alone in making this claim. The morning after the November election, The Guardian’s economics editor Larry Elliott wrote an inflation-centered piece arguing that price increases had “helped secure [a] Trump win.” On Elliott’s view, “Trump insisted while campaigning that the economy was in poor shape, a message that resonated with many Americans unhappy about the increases in the cost of living during Joe Biden’s presidency.” Or as the Wall Street Journal’s chief economics commentator Greg Ip recently put it: “Nothing did more to deliver the White House to Donald Trump than inflation.”

It’s not (only) the economy

But while we shouldn’t deny the economic hardships that many ordinary Americans face, inflation-centered accounts of Trump’s return to the White House suffer from multiple flaws. First, the overall estimated 5.2% inflation rate under Biden’s presidency was hardly Biden’s fault alone; it was the predictable outcome of the trillions of dollars in necessary government spending on much-needed pandemic relief programs, but also the effects of pandemic-related supply-chain disruptions, energy and food price shocks from external causes like the Ukraine War, and the foreseeable result of a reopened world economy as the COVID-19 pandemic came to an end.

Second, and more importantly, inflation was largely under control by the time the 2024 election had arrived. By October 2024, the month before the election, the all-items price index had risen 2.6% over the last 12 months, hardly an earth-shattering level; and the 12-month percentage change of food prices in the U.S. stood at 2.1%, almost half of what had been the case in October 2020, the month prior to Biden’s defeat of Trump at the polls.

In 2024, U.S. voters had, of course, been through a period of high inflation under Biden, evidenced by the significant decline in real wages in the first half of his presidency; but by the end of 2024, real wages were back at their pre-pandemic levels.

In short, inflation wasn’t an “objective” reality that Trump could simply point to and allow to run its own course among the electorate. Instead, it was a constructed, spectral presence, which Trump skillfully repackaged along with other key elements of his politics, including anti-transgender attacks, nationalist nativism, and “culture-war” positioning, to snap up voters from the opposing side. As important as the “pure” economic effects of inflation may have been was the political activation of inflation as a weaponized signifier in the far-right’s battle against centrist neoliberalism. To claim that inflation was the “cause” of Trump’s rise, unadulterated by processes of communicative construction, would be to accept uncritically the far right’s own problem-diagnosis, falling prey to its propagandistic portrayals of social reality.

Again, this isn’t to say that ordinary people’s economic concerns shouldn’t be taken seriously nor that everything was rosy in the realm of the economy pre-November 2024. To take just one indicator: The top 10 percent of Americans controlled more than 70 percent of the country’s net wealth and nearly half of its pre-tax income in 2023, according to the World Income Database—an astonishing level of economic inequality that feeds into ongoing social pathologies. But even in the realm of “hard” economic inequalities, one could imagine a far-right movement tapping into and exploiting these differences for their own political gains; inequality is not in and of itself a “leftwing cause,” because it too can be weaponized by the right to devastating effect, as history has shown.

The German inflation conundrum

Returning to the recent German elections, there is a basic empirical issue with the inflation-centered explanation: A poll conducted by infratest dimap, published on election day, showed that when AfD voters were asked, “Which issue plays the biggest role in your voting decision?,” 38 percent answered “immigration,” 33 percent answered “internal security,” while only 8 percent chose “economic growth” and 6 percent “rising prices.” AfD voters, when pressed to pick their defining issue, largely didn’t opt for the economy, but chose either nativism or law-and-order concerns. And when all voters were asked the same question, only 5 percent placed inflation first; on this point, AfD voters didn’t diverge from the wider body politic.

Furthermore, as the chart below shows, as in the United States pre-November 2024, Germany’s inflation is nowhere near its 2021-2022 peak. So again, an inflation-centered account must consider how the memory and sensation of inflation were activated within political consciousness.

One could claim that while inflation might not have been number one on most voters’ list of self-reported priorities, including AfD voters, inflation could have contributed to the wider political-economic climate that in turn allowed immigration, nativism, and xenophobia to combine into a virulent stew. Inflation would then serve as the hard economic backdrop against which other “cultural” issues, like immigration or “safety,” could play out and rise to the forefront of public consciousness—on the thesis that an economically anxious population is more likely to be receptive to exclusionary messaging about foreign or non-native Others.

While it would be difficult to find clinching evidence for such mechanisms, economic issues weren’t unimportant to German voters: 53 percent of those polled reported that “I’m very worried that prices will rise so much that I won't be able to pay my bills,” while 48 percent were “very worried” that they would no longer be able to maintain their living standard, suggestive of real economic, inflation-driven concerns in half the voting population.

And while that might seem like definite proof of the inflation-as-backdrop idea, this risks getting the ordering exactly wrong: For what if it isn’t inflation that’s driving nativism, but nativist provocations that are fueling fears about the economy?

One suggestive piece of evidence in this direction is that while 48 percent of German voters were “very worried” that they wouldn’t be able to maintain their living standards, only 17 percent of voters were similarly worried that they would lose their job. Even more tellingly, while 83 percent of all voters rated the country’s economic situation as poor (schlecht), a whopping 67 percent of AfD voters reported that “My personal economic situation is good.”

These seemingly puzzling disconnects—between a sense of deteriorating “living standards” yet a simultaneous felt job security, and between the whole country’s perceived “economic situation” and one’s own personal economic situation—are the product of repeated messaging: about the “threat” of immigrants living on the dole, taking up precious public resources, burdening the welfare state, attacking the core values of society, spreading insecurity and criminality, and so on. Narrativization is the only sensible way of accounting for the fact that many far-right voters report feeling economically secure while simultaneously believing that the country is, somehow, collapsing around them.

Return to the discourses!

The problem with inflation-centered explanations for the rise of far-right politicians is that, without precision and refinement, they risk lapsing into a reductive form of vulgar materialism that fails to take seriously the communicative, symbolic, cultural, and discursive nature of politics. The domain of the political is also a language game, a game of signs, involving processes of symbolic construction, whereby issues do not merely “exist” out there in reality, in prefabricated form, ready to be plucked from the tree of ideology: Reality also has to be actively constructed by willing political agents; the sense of “what really matters” is also in part epiphenomenal to politicians’ processes of manufacturing and manipulation of our sense of reality.

In other words, discourses are autonomous, and discourses are not reducible to brute economic facts—if we can even speak of economic facts as independent from political construction and sense-making: Our perception of economic realities is always in part a product of how the media, political class, experts, and so on speak about the economy, and is not just a matter of how much money sits in one’s account or how much one has left over at the end of the month. We inhabit a world of mirrors, which is to say, a world of discourses.

As the anthropologists Vito Laterza and Louis Römer show in a recent essay, communication counts, and Trump’s 2024 campaign was rooted in a skillful process of narrative construction more than in “objective” economic realities:

During Trump’s 2024 re-election campaign, the momentum of the culture war helped him warp objective reality into a fantasy world where the American economy allegedly reached near catastrophic status, and migrants were to blame for virtually every ill of American society – from high housing costs to the opioid crisis, from low wages to gun violence.

Material realities count, of course, and this isn’t to deny the reality of economic pain that many ordinary people have experienced at the tail end of the neoliberal revolution that began with Reagan and Thatcher in the 1980s. But the realm of the symbolic isn’t just some superstructure to be dismissed out of hand. The game of signs, signifiers, and signification can take on a life of its own, even at times even becoming completely divorced from any economic base. Human beings are cultural, political, sign-making animals, and therefore almost infinitely malleable.

Again, this isn’t to say that economic facts don’t create a receptivity to particular kinds of messaging. At certain historical junctures, voting patterns can be heavily influenced by economic “facts.” But we ignore the autonomous reality of political communication at our own peril. Politicians can activate economic resentments by constructing narratives around the Other. Both Trump and the AfD in Germany (aided and abetted by Elon Musk) have fused economic anxieties with nativist resentments to great effect in recent months. We do ourselves a disservice if we reduce their labor of symbolic manipulation to a kind of economic determinism.

TheoryBrief Links

Thank you for reading The Theory Brief. Here are some other things worth reading and thinking about this week:

• NBC News: House GOP panel passes budget blueprint with $4.5 trillion in tax cuts and steep spending reductions

• CNN: USAID to lay off 2,000 employees and put most remaining staff on administrative leave | CNN Politics

• Bloomberg: Palantir’s Call to Arms Is Also a Sales Pitch

• Washington Post. Trump again raises idea of running for an unconstitutional third term

• The Guardian: US Senate passes budget resolution to fund Trump’s deportation plan

• Bloomberg: DC Would Make a Great 51st State

• NY Times: Bernie Sanders Isn’t Giving Up His Fight

• Reuters: China seeks stronger cooperation with Germany and EU | Reuters

• Futurism.com: Economist Warns That Elon Musk Is About to Cause a "Deep, Deep Recession"

Unpopular populists?

Americans want to see Elon Musk wielding less influence, a recent poll suggests: 43% say he should have no influence at all; and while 59% think he has “a lot” of influence, only 16% think he should possess this degree of influence.

In addition, much of what Trump has done so far is deeply unpopular, according to a Washington Post-Ipsos poll:

•57 percent say Trump has “exceeded his authority since taking office.”

•Those who strongly oppose Trump’s actions in his first month “outnumber those who strongly support by 37 percent to 27 percent.”

•Trump’s approval rating is falling: 53 percent disapprove vs. 45 percent who approve of the president.

Returning to The Brink

The 2019 documentary, The Brink, on Steve Bannon and his transnational network of far-right allies, is well worth a revisit. While at times approaching a kind of aestheticization of Bannon, which therefore risks romanticizing him, the film nevertheless pulls back from the brink of its subject’s own abyss to reveal the hollowness of globalized nationalism(s).

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