By Dandy Andy
Since the January inauguration, developments in the US have proceeded with breathtaking speed in a way that fulfills and moves beyond Steve Bannon’s 2018 call to “flood the zone with shit.” Bannon was calling for the massive use of disinformation to undermine the media. The current Trump administration has learned the lesson and expanded its purview. From its first day in office, the Trump administration has “flooded the zone with shit” in an unremitting attack on what the majority of Americans and citizens of the European world in general think of as fundamental human rights. For both the media and the left, much of the focus has been on the ICE raids and deportations, in which foreign nationals legally in the US and even American citizens have been swept up. One of the most recent developments was the arrest of Milwaukee County Circuit judge Hannah Dugan for allegedly helping an undocumented Mexican immigrant evade arrest.
A lot of attention has also gone to the dishonest manipulation of the concept of antisemitism and the attack on the Palestinian support movement, particularly the way both have been used to attack postsecondary institutions and generally limit freedom of speech and assembly and the way it crosses over with the ICE attacks on migrants, the detention and push to deport Mahmoud Khalil being the most mediatized example.
Continuing a trend that began with the first Trump administration and continued throughout the Biden years, LGBTQ+ people, particularly trans people, find themselves the focal point of a particular brutal attempt at erasure—from book bans in school through denial of hormone replacement therapy to the recent executive order empowering notorious homophobe and transphobe JD Vance to purge the Smithsonian and related institutions of references to LGBTQ+ history.
The attacks on DEI, while affecting all marginalized communities, is particularly an attack on the limited gains of Black Americans over the last several decades, won, we should not forget, at the cost of much bloodshed.
Funding cuts that decimate the programs Native peoples rely on to address the destruction of their communities by more than five hundred years of colonization go hand in hand with—in fact, complement—the administration’s “drill, baby, drill” ethos and deep cuts to environmental protection programs. The resulting mineral and oil development and the related pipelines will have a disproportionate impact on Native communities and their already insubstantial land base. On an ideological level, the attack on Native peoples was solidified by the removal of all mention of Native peoples from Columbus Day celebrations, which are to return to being unabashed celebrations of colonization and genocide.
The executive order calling for the Education Department to be dismantled and the massive cuts to Medicaid that are being proposed will have a far-reaching impact on all Americans, but it is people with disabilities who will feel the greatest impact, losing both the programs that meet special educational needs and access to necessary health support. The Medicaid cuts will also have an extremely detrimental effect on the well-being of elderly people. Both of these initiatives reflect capital’s desire to entirely free itself from responsibility for sections of the population it sees as unproductive and, therefore, expendable.
All of this barely scratches the surface of the “shit that has flooded the zone” since January, which will mean a quantum leap in human suffering and death, species extinction, and climate collapse.
Not surprisingly and not without justification, this has led many people to argue that the US is in the grip of fascism. While i think it is unquestionable that the Trump administration is testing the limits of an extreme right-wing authoritarianism, and it is likely that at least some of the members of his administration are fascists, i would argue that the debate about whether or not we are dealing with fascism is diversionary—what need concern us is not one particularly charged and ill-defined word but the worst-case scenario outcome we are facing and how we can resist it.
My own position is that the current US administration is proto-fascist. Taking the government is not the same as seizing the state. We should not lose sight of the fact that the state is primarily made up of unelected officials who are pursuing lifelong careers, while governments come and go. It is little surprise that undermining the integrity of the civil service was an early priority for the Trump administration. These individuals have significant power to determine the degree to which any government policy will be enacted and the speed at which that will occur. What, for example, will the military do if the Trump administration attempts to use it to quell internal dissent, as it threatened to do during the George Floyd uprising? Will it resist Trump’s encroachments? Will it acquiesce? Will it publicly split around the issue? An obviously unstable and divided military would undermine US power on the international stage. Similar factors are at play in other sectors of the state. How this unfolds is very dependent on what the popular response is. A strong anti-Trump movement would bring all of these issues to a head. Even a strongly cohesive militarized fascist regime cannot survive indefinitely in the face of a consistent popular resistance, and the Trump administration, fascist or not, is hardly leading a cohesive militarized regime.
In fact, the Trump movement is something different than what the MAGA label encompasses. MAGA is, after all, a propaganda artifice, and like any such tool, it is meant to create unity across difference without addressing the differences. I identify (at least) five major components to the Trump movement. First, there is Trump himself, who, perhaps because of rather than in spite of his inconsistency and incoherence, serves as the unifying figure, based on his shrewd capacity to read his audience and tell them what they want to hear, even if it contradicts what he said yesterday and will do tomorrow. This is doubtless a necessary factor for unifying this movement, but it is to no small degree undercut by Trump’s obvious need for complete acquiescence on the part of his closest associates and his capacity to sabotage even his own plans by impulsive actions taken in a fit of pique. In this sense, there is always the possibility that Trump will blow up Trumpism.
Second, there is the Project 2025 group, which holds a number of administrative posts: Russell Vought (Director of the Office of Management and Budget), Peter Navarro (Senior Counsellor for Trade and Manufacturing), Brendan Carr (Chair of the Federal Communications Commission), Tom Homan (Associate Director of Enforcement and Removal Operations), Brian J. Cavanaugh (Associate Director for Homeland Security), James Baehr (General Counsel, Department of Veterans Affairs), Paul Atkins (Commissioner of the Securities and Exchange Commission), and Stephen Billy (Senior Advisor, Office of Management and Budget) are all contributors to Project 2025 who now have positions with the administration. This group represents the socially conservative wing of capital that has been organizing in groups like the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society, as well as a series of far-right churches and Christian organizations, patiently working toward our current moment for forty or more years, essentially spanning the neoliberal era to its current juncture. It is reasonable to expect this group to align with established capital.
Third, we have what the media and the left have come to call the tech bros. This group is, of course, most associated with Vice President JD Vance, Peter Thiel (perhaps best described as an unofficial advisor), Elon Musk (Senior Advisor to the President), and the DOGE, but also includes David Sacks (Chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology; AI and cryptocurrency czar), Sriram Krishnan (Senior Policy Advisor on Artificial Intelligence), Michael Kratsios (Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy), Jacob Helberg (nominee for Undersecretary of State for Economic Growth, Energy, and the Environment), Jared Isaacman (nominee for Administrator of NASA), Marc Andreessen (“talent” recruiter for the DOGE), Joe Lonsdale (key figure in Elon Musk’s America PAC), and Shaun Maguire (a Musk associate and prominent public supporter of Trump), all of whom have roles, within the administration or at its edges, that will allow them to influence policy.
Fourth is what I will call for shorthand Bannon-style far-right populism, the core of the actual MAGA movement. The followers of Steve Bannon, and to a lesser degree Alex Jones and Joe Rogan, the latter a complicated and contradictory figure in this panoply, as well as a legion of lesser social media influencers. The closest thing this tendency has to an in with the Trump administration is Laura Loomer, and it is unclear how far her influence reaches. While there are plausible claims that Loomer influenced Trump’s decision to fire a series of security officials in April, Loomer herself says that while she has the president’s ear, she is frozen out by the rest of the administration, denying her the seat at the table that she would like and raising serious questions about how lasting her impact will be, particularly given Trump’s propensity for jettisoning even his closest associates when they become in any way inconvenient. The importance of this tendency is, in any case, not its direct relationship with the Trump administration but its organic connection to a popular movement, which neither the Project 2025 crew nor tech capital have. In short, although outside of the government, Bannon et al. have a capacity to put boots in the street that far surpasses that of the factions closer to the administration.
Fifth, and definitely a wild card, are the numerous neo-Nazi and white supremacist groupuscules and individuals who feel little if any fealty to this government but see an opening to push their toxic agenda forward. There is little doubt that this milieu will eventually wreak havoc. Related to this latter faction are the numerous, mostly young, primarily male, people radicalized largely on social media, whose politics, such as they are, are best described as nihilist. They are the people who engage in school shootings, car attacks on crowds, and random antisemitic, Islamophobic, racist, and genderist attacks. In this category the most dangerous are the so-called Incels who have created an entire mythos complete with martyrs that centers on the mass murder of women. What response these groups and individuals will receive from the Trump government is to be seen.
That is the enemy I believe we face, and it is far from a unified enemy. In fact, a number of fault lines are apparent among the various factions that make up the pro-Trump camp. It is unclear, for example, just how far the shaky alliance between the MAGA movement and the Trump administration will go before an insurmountable contradiction arises. This base has, after all, cut its teeth on anti-elite rhetoric and putative anti-elite activity, the ideological thread that bound together, for example, the diverse elements involved in the January 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol Building. The administration surrounding Trump is, as already noted, nothing if not a conglomeration of the established capitalist and big tech elites. This will be a weapon available to the MAGA movement’s leadership should they feel the need to mobilize against the Trump administration. How the Trump administration would respond to opposition from the more grassroots section of its base remains an open question, as does the potential response of the state’s repressive apparatus.
“The major potential fault line within the Trump administration [is] the contradictory interests of the established capital of the Project 2025 crew with those of the representatives of big tech capital gathered around Elon Musk.”
It’s axiomatic that the role of a bourgeois government is to defend the interests of one or more factions of capital. In the case of the current Trump administration, this has taken the form of an attempt to completely eviscerate the remnants of the welfare state, but it has gone well beyond that with tariffs that not only guarantee a substantial decline in the quality of life of a majority of US citizens, as usual disproportionately impacting the poor and marginalized. The inevitable trade war that the tariffs set in motion has meant the same for most of the world’s countries, including the US’s traditional closest allies in the European world. On the face of it, tariffs are not in the interests of either of the major sections of capital represented in the current administration, with the chaos created on the stock market, in the manufacturing sector, and for retail, along with the inevitable reduced spending power of Americans at large providing evidence of this. Of equal interest is the Trump administration’s seeming indifference to the impact these moves have had on far-right parties elsewhere in the European world, with whom it has enjoyed close relationships over the years, some of whom have suffered as a result of their association with Trump.
The very way in which the tariffs have been enacted (along with the circus sideshow about annexing Greenland and Canada) provide a clue to the intent. It is a conscious decision to throw the US’s traditional allies under the bus, effectively setting in motion the destruction of an alliance that has existed since the end of World War II. This is supported by the parallel decision to pull out of a variety of international bodies, including the World Health Organization (WHO), the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC), the UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), and the Paris Climate Agreement, with the promise that this is only the beginning. Taken together, this indicates an intention to reorganize the international balance of power and the world’s economy, the gamble being short-term pain (primarily for the citizenry) for long-term gain (primarily for the billionaire class). It is a decision fraught with risks, not least the trade war with China that this sets in motion, with the potential of a hot war ensuing—all of this occurring in a scenario where new, previously unimaginable, alliances will likely take shape.
This brings us to what I would consider to be the major potential fault line within the Trump administration, the contradictory interests of the established capital of the Project 2025 crew with those of the representatives of big tech capital gathered around Elon Musk—even within these two factions there are inevitably fault lines based on ego, personality, and discrete interests. The distinction between these two wings of capital is clearly reflected in the positions they hold within the administration, the Project 2025 contributors occupying more established and mainstream positions, while the tech capital representatives are largely found in newly minted positions almost uniformly dealing with areas related to new technologies. These two factions may be able to coalesce around a minimum program of sorts—in fact, the decision to pull out of numerous international bodies and abrogate environmental agreements, and the destruction of established geopolitical alliances likely reflect that minimum program—but there is little likelihood that they could unite around a maximum program. At the end of the day, the interests of these two factions are not the same, and a gain by one is likely to be a loss for the other. Big tech capital made its bones by seizing control of e-commerce and the development and sale of new technologies, largely displacing and replacing the traditional brick-and-mortar world of previous capital in the process. (For tech capital, Covid was a godsend.)
Project 2025 presents an exceptionally cohesive and socially conservative vision of the US this wing of capital hopes to build. While figures like Thiel and Musk might stand out for their apparent far-right convictions, in general, a proactively anti-LGBTQ+, anti-migrant, Islamophobic, racist, ableist, and misogynist society does not serve the interests of big tech. This isn’t to say that big tech in any way skews left or even consistently liberal. More to the point, big tech lacks any sort or all-encompassing ideology, very specifically because its interests are best served by a social free-for-all where all positions and lifestyles can be capitalized upon. (A perusal of Amazon will illustrate my point.) While one might accuse the Project 2025 group of having an extremely conservative, possibly even proto-fascist, morality, big tech is best described as opportunistically amoral.
Inevitably, these two factions can only coexist uneasily for so long before one of them prevails. This struggle will inevitably play out within the Trump administration, creating a certain degree of instability, possibly even a great deal.
It’s a good bet that big tech will win this power struggle, and it’s clear that many people recognize that, which has given rise to an increasingly common use of two terms, particularly when discussing recent developments: “technofeudalism” and “technofascism.” Let’s parse that.
First, “technofeudalism.” In his book titled Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, Yanis Varoufakis argues that capitalism has already been defeated by a tech-based feudal system of capital accumulation. To nutshell his argument, perhaps painfully, a class that plays the same role as a traditional feudal overlord has seized control of the economy—Jeff Bezos and Amazon being the archetypical example. Traditional manufacturing and the related retail are now reduced to a vassal role, paying a fee to the overlord to conduct business. We the people are the serfs. Not only do we pay a fee to the overlord to purchase the products we desire, but all of our interactions with the multiple websites and platforms making up the world of big tech are used to allow for the improvement of algorithms and the better “training” of the increasingly ubiquitous AI, with the goal of selling us more crap, in the process eliminating the expense of ongoing market research that was typical for traditional capital in the process—in short, like serfs, we provide free labour to our overlord for the privilege of continuing to exist. Varoufakis argues that this is no longer capitalism but a new form of capital accumulation, and he asserts that it is already victorious. While i find Varoufakis’s argument persuasive and think that big tech will likely win the power struggle for control of the US and world’s economy, I consider the claim that we are already there to be premature.
The term “technofascism” has grown in popularity since Trump’s second electoral victory, particularly following Musk’s inauguration day stiff-armed salute. The substance of the argument behind the claim that we are experiencing technofascism is that big tech has at its disposal the means to shape the culture of any society at its essentially authoritarian whim and is doing so.
The two terms, in fact, describe different aspects of a single phenomenon, “technofeudalism,” the hegemony of big tech capital over other forms of capital, and “technofascism,” a political structure for that hegemony. While there are strong reasons to believe that big tech will succeed in asserting its hegemony, it has not yet done so, and until that power struggle plays out there can be no certainty about what the final political outcome will look like. There are simply too many factors at play and too many potential contradictions on the horizon to allow for any final assessments to be made at this juncture.
Whether or not a mass movement arises to resist the Trump administration’s authoritarian initiatives is central to how all of this unfolds. I have addressed elsewhere the form that i think that resistance should take. I will limit myself here to reiterating that it is our role in this context to do everything in our power to ensure that the resistance that does arise is unabashedly and resolutely anti-capitalist, and to do so we need to step outside of our comfort zone and engage with the people who are already taking to the streets, many of them for the first time in their lives. That means a lot more than observing and discussing among ourselves. If we are to have any influence, we need to get down in the dirt where it’s happening and make our presence felt.
To do so, we must, first and foremost, recognize that any perception of the Trump administration as a group of sociopaths behaving irrationally is a nonstarter. We need an adequate analysis of the nature of our enemy, including our enemy’s strengths and weaknesses and the existing contradictions between different factions among our opponents and those likely to arise. To address struggles between and within classes a solid understanding of the economics at play is essential. Without a clear analysis as the basis for a realistic way forward in our current situation, we risk falling into a panic that will reinforce rather than resist social paralysis.
Image Credit
Official White House photo by Molly Riley, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.