We've truly turned a corner. And why? Because people were annoyed about of the cost of eggs? No.There's much more to it than that. I fear we've become the capitalist version of the Soviet Union in '91. What happened there then and what is happening here now was the result of a profound loss of confidence in the governing establishment. We're at the beginning of a Post-Liberal Order.
What follows? Well, first chaos, and then the emergence of oligarchic warlords jockeying for power--guys like Musk and Bezos. Trump is clearly the perfect figure to have in the White House to facilitate America's becoming a a Russian-style oligarchic kleptocracy. He's no Putin, but somebody will emerge in the next ten years who will be.
It was not unforeseeable. Here's an excerpt from a piece I wrote in November 2021:
America in 2025
The historical irony is rich. Democracy has a better than even chance of being permanently subverted by those who in their delusions believe it already has been. They aim to turn the country in fact into a far worse version of what in their fevered imaginations they already believe it has become. ...
The Right has every reason to expect that there will be little to no resistance to their coup if it succeeds because Liberal resistance to authoritarianism is mostly abstract and procedural. Once they lose the procedural battles, there will be nothing for the Left to fight with except to take to the streets, which will happen, but with little effect.
There will be a few Catos who will speak out in Congress, but they'll be censured, mocked, or otherwise made irrelevant. The Liberal talking heads on cable will squawk for a while, but pressure will be put on their corporate bosses to replace them. (Remember what happened to Phil Donahue?) A few harmless, token Liberals will be kept on TV--remember Alan Colmes, the stereotypical, weak-kneed liberal prop placed on set to make Hannity look strong and principled. Some will sue to protect their first amendment rights, but It won't matter if even in the short run the supreme court supports them because the Justice Department won't enforce anything except that which supports the administration's authoritarian agenda.
A few famous Liberals will emerge who find clever ways to justify the new authoritarianism: he or she will say that it was inevitable, that the old system proved itself incapable of dealing with complex problems, that this was the only way forward. But she or he will defend all the iconic liberal cultural causes, not that doing so will change anything. Even Putin allows for token opposition to provide the simulacra of democracy. The business world will applaud the new stability. The Churches will applaud the new emphasis on "Christian values".
It will be a soft authoritarianism at first. The nasty racialist stuff and anti-LGBTQ stuff will come later. But life will go on for most people as it does now in other authoritarian regimes. Not that much will change in day-to-day life. Most people will keep their heads down and just go about their business. A few brave voices will speak out, and they will disappear. Most people, even those who consider themselves political junkies now, will lose interest in politics. What would be the point? It's one thing to have an opinion; it's another to get fired or thrown into jail for having it.
A new social hierarchy will emerge. Party members, collaborators, and then everybody else. Ambitious young people will join the party saying they don't care about politics, but joining provides the only path for a decent career. They have to think about their families. The universities will fire notorious Liberals and require a loyalty oath from everyone else. Classroom surveillance cameras will insure that nothing "subversive" be taught.
Will it get that bad? Despite what I wrote above, I believed that as a people we had more common sense and more common decency than to put this sad little man back in the oval. I think my blindspot was my not appreciating how media consumption has so profoundly changed things, how deeply everyone has become sunk in their respective information or misinformation silos. If Trump prevails in the next few years, we'll soon live in a country where misinformation is pretty much all we'll get, at least in the MSM. The Rachel Maddows of the world will go underground or broadcast from New Zealand.
But the hard fact is that, no matter what the reasons, we did put him back, and now the world is changed in a way that most Americans, even most Trump voters, won't like very much when it becomes clear what's happened. We're not grieving yet, most of us, because we're still in a state of denial. We can't believe that it's come to this.
If it's to be stopped, where will resistance come from? The military and Deep State? That would be as ironic as it is improbable. Perhaps the House after the '26 midterms? I assume that in the next two years Trump, despite his announcement that even his own supporters won't have to worry about voting again, won't be able to prevent those elections. We'll see. And there's hope that the coastal blue states can be a site of resistance. But perhaps the best hope is in the hubris and incompetence of the people who are trying to engineer this coup. Again, we'll see.
But who knows? There are variables at play here that nobody, me especially, understands. But I think we should assume that the next two years are going to be bad as you could imagine in Washington and in the MAGA states. There is always hope, but for now it's very hard to be optimistic.