Fluid Fascism
Combining the concept of diagonalism with Zygmunt Bauman's "liquid modernity" allows us to better grasp Trump's flexible ideology.
Trump’s chosen ideology is what we might term fluid fascism, a remarkably flexible and adaptive ideological approach that cuts across the political spectrum and familiar divides, allowing the two-term president to engage in policy liquefaction: oozing from right to left and back again, fluid fascism lets Trump behave like a traditional military imperialist one day, promising to annex Greenland, Canada, the Panama Canal, and Gaza Strip, while the next posing as an antiwar peacenik, expressing a desire to slash Pentagon budgets via Musk’s DOGE, and to coordinate with Russia and China to “cut our military budget in half” by reducing nuclear stockpiles.
The political theorist William Callison and historian Quinn Slobodian have dubbed elements of this political style “diagonal thinking,” borrowing an emic term from the German anti-covid/alt-right’s notion of Querdenken (“thinking outside the box”; or more literally, “lateral thinking”), an eponymous, pandemic-era movement that embraced anti-vaxx ideas and conspiratorial reasoning. The Querdenkers, as they became known, became a kind of continental European branch office of QAnon, embracing the sort of anti-lockdown anti-authoritarianism that a facile critique of biopolitics—like that of the philosopher Giorgio Agamben—might invite.
Diagonalism denotes the recombination of left- and right-styled policies and positions, though with clear (far-)right-wing proclivities at heart; or as Callison and Slobodian put it, “diagonalists tend to contest conventional monikers of left and right (while generally arcing toward far-right beliefs).” There is an emphasis on the critique of power, both state and corporate, that clearly carries with it elements of the spirit of May ’68. And the self-image of rebellion and radicalism, or Foucauldian parrhesia (the courage to “say it all”), is not only borrowed but lifted from the left; it even goes some way toward explaining the identity crisis of the left today, for if the very notion of rebellion has been appropriated by the diagonal right, where does that leave the left? What psychological refuge might remain for those who have prided themselves on the carnivalesque atmosphere of “Occupy” or the “ruthless criticism of all that exists”?
Teflon Trump
Trump’s diagonalism remains his most powerful weapon. It allows him to order ICE raids on sanctuary cities, deport undocumented migrants to Guantanamo Bay, and denigrate Haitian-Americans in Springfield, Ohio, while at the same time widening his appeal among Hispanic voters and the “multiracial Right.” Who else in Western politics could get away with it? It allows Trump to dupe (some) Arab-American voters into voting for him, while simultaneously promoting a plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza and tightening the already historically close bonds to Israel and Netanyahu’s government. In short, diagonalism allows Trump to play all sides at once, cycling between seemingly contradictory positions without falling victim to charges of hypocrisy or self-contradiction, which for other politicians would likely have devastating consequences. Instead, diagonalism demands a hard-shelled obduracy; most people have too much essential decency to be able to play the diagonalist game: They see the obvious self-contradictions and lack the shamelessness required of a true diagonalist operator.
Is Trump’s apparent lack of a stable core merely a figment—a convenient illusion? Project 2025, widely described as the blueprint of Trump II, is an 887-page document that contains rather less “liquidity” than Trump’s self-presentation would otherwise suggest. Here are hard-edged policy recommendations and proposals, with very real, objective effects on the ground if implemented in full. But again, Trump is not slavishly following the blueprint; in some cases, he is already going much farther than its technocratic prose suggests. On USAID, for instance, Project 2025 suggests that the “next conservative Administration should scale back USAID’s global footprint by, at a minimum, returning to the agency’s 2019 pre–COVID-19 pandemic budget level”—but Trump and Musk seem more inclined to implement “plans that would all but dismantle” USAID, as the New York Times reports.
The fact is that while Project 2025 speaks repeatedly of a “conservative Administration” (a phrase appearing 71 times in the document), Trump II is anything but “conservative,” certainly in the strict sense of that word and the political tradition that underpins it: a traditionalist ideology aimed at conserving that which came before. Trump’s second administration is more like a radical insurgency, and insurgencies demand flexibility above all else; rigor would likely be their rigor mortis. Drastically reconfiguring the American federal state and realigning the global order in a “postliberal” direction are major undertakings that would seem to require a hybridized, fluid, fleet-footed approach. Trump will likely implement a good deal of Project 2025, as the Times has already shown, but there will be room for some distancing as well as an accentuation or aggravation of its core tenets; flexibility and an absence of essential constraints are key.
All That is Solid
In 2000, the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman published a groundbreaking work in social theory, Liquid Modernity, in which he tries (among many things) to describe a fundamental shift from the “hardness” of traditional modernity to the “lightness” of late modernity:
Travelling light, rather than holding tightly to things deemed attractive for their reliability and solidity - that is, for their heavy weight, substantiality and unyielding power of resistance - is now the asset of power.
Bauman took his “liquid” framework and applied it to a whole range of social and cultural issues. In the 2003 book Liquid Love, for instance Bauman suggests that something fundamental has changed in the realm of romantic coupling: No longer beholden to the ideal of lifelong marriages, Western culture increasingly invokes the ideal of short-lived, rapidly shifting relations, sometimes even virtual (or “electronic”) in character. While a bit dated now, the basic approach is clearly applicable even in our age of Tinder and company. As one interviewee Bauman cites says, “one decisive advantage of electronic relation[s]” is that “you can always press ‘delete’.”
Transitoriness over permanence, liquidity over solidity—this paradoxical “permanence of transitoriness,” as Bauman describes it, is not just the condition of romantic love (which can be exaggerated given the levels of marriage, stable coupling, etc.), but is taken to describe the basic condition of late modernity as such, filtering into everything from relationships to politics and work. In our working lives, the normative career is no longer that of a lifelong term of employment, but rather a series of shorter employment contracts, up to and including discarding the very notion of fixed employment altogether, so that we instead become “entrepreneurial selves”—project-based contractors or even hyperflexible gig workers toiling on (and for) multiple platforms.
Fascist Adaptability
So why should the politics of the world’s most powerful leader be any different? Trump’s fluid fascism is but the ne plus ultra liquidity of late modernity writ large—of course, pulled in a violently reactive, authoritarian direction that was never historically necessary but the outcome of contingent political struggles, in which centrist neoliberals failed to put up a sufficient fight.
The adaptability of Trump’s ideology is something he has in common with fascisms of the past as well; the historian Robert Paxton writes of the “malleability of fascisms,” which requires us to “study fascism in motion,” rather than view it as a fixed, static program.
In pushing a fluid, diagonalist politics, Trump has turned himself into the most formidable (teflon-coated) political figure in the world today, whose recombinant politics allows him to soak up broad demographic support and extract political profits from multiple contradictory positions.
It does not make his politics in any way unassailable. Naturally, the answer is not to respond in kind by turning into unscrupulous diagonalists ourselves. But it does mean that a successful counter-Trumpist pushback must avoid sectarian infighting and instead craft a broad-based coalition based on a politics of decency, against the inhumanism of Trump and his ideological allies. Times of profound crisis call for a politics of the popular front, in which all groups of good will, from radical leftists to the center-right, might join together in common cause to roll back the swelling tide of international fascism.
Thank you for reading The Theory Brief. Below are some of the other issues worth thinking and reading about this week:
The Twitter deal as “campaign contribution”
Federal filings show that Harris and the Democrats raised $2.9 billion, outspending Trump and Republican-affiliated groups, who only raised $1.8 billion. But could Musk’s $44-billlion Twitter acquisition in 2022 be viewed as a sort of in-kind campaign contribution alongside his formal contributions of $277 million? On Election Day, The Guardian noted that “Musk is weaponizing X’s features. He’s bending the posts of others to his political will, curating the discussion into an alternative reality.”
Returning to the saga of Musk’s 2022 Twitter takeover now suggests that this—in purely business terms—irrational multi-billion-dollar business transaction makes far more sense if its true telos was to leverage influence and help place Musk in close proximity to presidential power (as pictured above). Thus, the Washington Post’s review, “How Elon Musk broke Twitter as he turned it into X,” seems to get it exactly wrong: Musk didn’t “break” Twitter; he repurposed it to advance a political project. Profitability narrowly conceived was never the point.
In case you missed it, here’s a review of the authoritative book on the Twitter deal:
Ireland—squeezed between Europe and the U.S.?
Tax Foundation: Ireland Tax Data Explorer
Ireland relies on corporate taxes for 15.9% of its tax revenue, a far higher share of government income than in most other European countries. And of that, just three companies paid one third of Ireland’s corporate tax earnings between 2017 and 2021. Offering itself as a low-tax destination in Europe for (above all) American corporations has been a successful growth model for the once-poor republic, but how will Ireland fare as the chasm between Europe and the U.S. widens?
Bird flu and DOGE cuts
The U.S. is in the midst of an H5N1 avian flu outbreak, which affected 23.1 million birds in the U.S. last month (see chart below, based on USDA/CDC data) and caused two more people to be hospitalized over the weekend, in Ohio and Wyoming, respectively. At the same time, Trump’s DOGE is targeting the labs tasked with tracking and combating the outbreak.
The Trump administration’s freeze on science communication meant the CDC “failed to release the agency's weekly publication, the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report” for two whole weeks last month, “marking the first time in decades the agency has not published the highly regarded mainstay of public health communication.”
This is yet more evidence that Trumpism is more than a domestic issue: It’s a global concern, potentially impacting the entire world. After all, viral outbreaks don’t respect national borders.
TheoryBrief Links
Al Jazeera: Which countries are the top military spenders and where does Europe rank?
New York Review of Books (Quinn Slobodian): What is DOGE?
The Atlantic: Growing Up Murdoch
YouTube/Verso: Adam Hanieh on oil, Palestine and petrochemicals
Critical Sociology: Michael Burawoy’s contributions published in Critical Sociology
London Review of Books (Perry Anderson): Made by the Revolution: Mao’s Right Hand
Washington Post: New Kennedy Center board elects Trump chair, fires Rutter as president
New York Magazine: Pope Informs J.D. Vance He’s Wrong About Migrants, Christianity
Reuters: Commerzbank to cut 3,900 mostly German jobs as it tries to head off UniCredit
Bloomberg: Elon Musk’s Tesla, SpaceX Relied on Undocumented Immigrant Workers
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Bauman , one of my favorite thinkers. He spoke about the importance of glocalism
This is a great piece, Victor. By enlisting Bauman, it explains aspects of Trump that I’ve noticed, but haven’t been able to provide a coherent framework for. Thanks for this.