Reflections on Authoritarian Times

Trump’s win surprised few political realists. What has taken nearly everyone by surprise is the rapid rollout of chaotic authoritarian governing facilitated by a detailed planning and strategy document (Project 2025), plutotechnocratic sycophants like Zuckerberg and Bezos, a docile Republican Party, a hapless Democratic one, a radical right Supreme Court majority, a limp mainstream media, a highly siloed social media, and a dis-educated popular base. Melinda Cooper has argued that the regime’s main purpose is to “build the antisocial state … and place its entire administrative apparatus in the hands of a small group of uber-wealthy business partners.”¹ But a second purpose, mirroring that of Orbán’s Hungary, is state transformation of national culture (high and low), education (primary schools through universities), family, and ethnic/national belonging—that is, a transformation of nation and society tout court. It is a revolutionary project intended not merely to dismantle democracy and the remains of the social and redistributive state, but to bring into being a new political-cultural-social order, one engineered if not heralded by a new governing form.

This new governing form did not come out of nowhere. Rather, it is the top blown off of what has been building for decades, not only on the right, and not only from neoliberal rationality: namely, the historically outmoded character of liberal democracy. The means of the new regime—bold power politics detached from the restraints of law, balance of powers, majority rule, or concern with conflicts of interest—revealed to all how easy liberal democracy is to dismantle but also simply, now, to set aside.

What do I mean by outmoded? More than merely the object of direct and angry assaults by the right, more than merely suffering the erosions and corrosions of neoliberalism, liberal democracy is unsuited to the global nature and complexity of the powers generating our most serious predicaments today—from climate change to the vicious extractivism of international finance. It is also part of what has brought us to the current pass, carrying as it does empire in its belly, capitalism on its back, and private interests in its heart, fueled from the beginning by fossil fuels whose residuals do not, as Andreas Folkers notes in a jibe at Marx, melt into the air but hang in it forever, as nanoplastics are now suspended in every body of water on earth and much of our air too.² Liberal democracy’s slow and sedimented institutional ways are maddening to climate change activists, tech bros, and financiers alike. Meanwhile capital, the radically undemocratizing force with which liberal democracy has been twinned since birth, has never been more powerful, more wily, or, on the one hand, more deeply entwined with state projects, while, on the other hand, more global and hence less submissive to the nation-states that housed modern democracy. Unable to reckon with their own violences and exclusions, human and non-human, and ever more openly manifesting their protections of elites, liberal democracies now hemorrhage populism left and right. Populism—popular rebellion against elite rule—is an organic retort to grotesquely undemocratic regimes masquerading as democratic. Opportunistic demagogues may exploit populist energies, but they originate elsewhere.

Indeed, one way to understand the right’s success today is that it is far more willing to abandon the exhausted political form of liberal democracy than the left is. The right’s objects of desire—ethnonationalism, heteronormative families, unfettered wealth accumulation, and police power—may be backward-looking. But its aspirational political form is not. Failure to grasp this blinds the left to where the crisis-responsive revolutionary impulses are now.

Of course, the Euro-Atlantic world has for at least four decades decades been departing the postwar vision of nations governed by the rule of law, popular consent, and advancement of human rights and welfare. Obviously, this vision never extended from core to periphery, to sites of imperial looting or Cold War struggle, to the disenfranchised and subordinated inside the West, or to the untimely settler colonialisms of the postwar period. All of its terms—from rule of law to human rights—have their violences, seamy undersides, and hypocrisies. Yet, born as it was in response to the ugly regimes and aggressive power politics in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century, the vision guided the building of Western social democracies and relatively peaceful cooperation among them. It was torpedoed first by the neoliberal revolutions closing out the last century, as markets and finance were unleashed to savage everything, including the social state, and legislative intervention was spurned by neoliberal advocates as social engineering at best, totalitarianism at worst. But on the back of this anti-democratic force, a novel power politics also returned with a vengeance, an element of the neoliberal revolution predicted neither by the neoliberals themselves nor by their Marxist critics. Notwithstanding the evidence of actually existing neoliberalism and state communism, both imagined economics could and would subdue politics. Perversely mirroring each other in treating the former as real, the latter as derivative, neither one of them appreciated that both distinctively human forms of power would perdure, whether entwined or in tension, nor that a form of governing reason featuring deregulated economic life would in time deregulate political life as well, unleashing its brutishness from all legal and institutional containers.

Trumpian power politics is importantly paired with economic bargaining, blackmail, or extortion, and with adoption of the national treasury as its purse for this work and the Department of Justice as its personal lawyers for it. Combined with brute intimidation of disloyalists, aggressive punishments of enemies, and a terroristic practice of random violence against the vulnerable, the operation in some ways resembles the style of the Mafia on which Trump cut his teeth as a New York real estate developer. Yet with so many tools of the state at hand (for example, the Office of Management and Budget and the Departments of Homeland Security, Justice, and Education), and so many assets (for example, the public treasury, public lands, and private philanthropy), and a super majority in the land’s highest court, this governance form does not depend on raw violence as tool of last resort, even as that violence is on display and part of the rhetoric. Instead its main tactic—from Ukraine to universities—replaces rules with dictate backed by the threat of economic ruin.

This extralegal political power is slicing through legislation, regulation, and constitutionalism; settled procedures, organizations, and agencies; and liberal democratic norms ranging from balance of powers to the peaceful transfer of power to allying with other liberal democracies. It is everywhere exhibiting what it can do to and with these things, not to mention democracy, and even capital, yanking or redeploying them all for its own purposes. It is revealing how raw political will yoked to economic largesse can remake the state for minor and major ends. It does not wield the state’s enormous bureaucratic machinery (Weber’s worry a century ago and a feature of twentieth century European fascism) but blends Machiavellian ferocity and unpredictability with terror tactics and hard economic bargaining.

Supervenient political power, of course, has never borne the autonomy from law and economics that liberalism frequently imputes to it.³ Still its intensity and crudeness today—the Milei chainsaw turned out to be such a perfect symbol—are a wake-up call to a left still bound almost exclusively to labor, social movements, and protests and too little interested in state power. They are also a wake-up call to centrists committed to the imagined guardrails of putatively neutral institutions, procedures, and rule of law—their fair and enduring quality, their non-manipulability by political power.

We might call this recovery of statism as a transformative if not revolutionary form of neo-Schmittianism on the right, for whom diktat is acceptable and the friend-enemy opposition is defining, and technocratism for the center, where metrics and algorithms replace bureaucracies and legislation as sources of policy and enforcement, as they do, for example, in European Union national budget balancing. Of course this statism was always an important if under-the-covers element of neoliberalism, too, which itself remains critical to the privatization aims of DOGE cuts and the deregulatory Trumpist aims in labor, commerce, real estate, banking, environmental and consumer protection, and more.

But could such power also be an element of a radical Rousseauism for those who seek to rival these partisan aims with left democratic ones? Is our challenge to develop what Anne Norton in Wild Democracy calls the necessity of “a free people ruling the law” rather than being ruled by it?⁴ This would require openness to strong democratic decisionism, to a new kind of transformative statism, and to modes of consolidating decentralized popular power to organize it strategically for political fights we want to win, not merely protest.

Put differently, how might radical social and ecological democracy rival this other political form rising from the ashes of liberal democracy?  Can we do with power what the right is doing but without either the terror or the corruption, and in pursuit of justice and earthly regeneration? Can flexible, concentrated political power be blended with exercising political freedom and equality in ways that recognize and practice the imbrication of non-human and human life? Are these possible blends? Are we too wary of the dangers of direct, deinstitutionalized political power to try? If we do not try, are we writing the left’s own epitaph?

Trumpism rests in openly remaking the state for the accumulation of capital, imperial power, and patriarchal ethnonationalist culture. It’s not a sticky long-term popular vision even if it has thus far been brilliantly crafted to anoint resentments and offer the many a delusional identification with supremacy and power while lining the pockets of the very rich. Our task is to craft a popular vision that offers the many a substantive part in making a habitable future. It is a humbler, harder, longer, and doubtless less exciting project. And it features few already powerful allies, like capital, or even educational institutions oriented to provisioning knowledge for democratic capacities. That said, Trumpism reminds us that seizing the state remains key to revolutionary transformations. Can we simultaneously build democratic experiments and challenges on the ground, and strategize to wield state power for democratic ends in the near future? Can we build a potent left statism in conjunction with decentralized democratic projects? An anti-Leninist Leninism perhaps?

1. Melinda Cooper, “Trump’s Antisocial State,” Dissent, 18 March 2025, https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/trumps-antisocial-state/. [↩]
2. Andreas Folkers, “Fossil Modernity,” Time & Society 30, no. 2 (2021): https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/epub/10.1177/0961463X20987965; Heather Davis, Plastic Matter (Duke University Press, 2022). [↩]
3. The irreducible politics of lawmaking and jurisprudence, and of economic institutions and relations, is overdue for theorizing by Marxists and liberals alike. Karl Polanyi is necessary but insufficient here. From Jack Jackson’s Law Without Future: Anti-Constitutional Politics and the American Right (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019) to Katharina Pistor’s The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality (Princeton University Press, 2019), we learn there is a deep vein for scholars to mine to discover the imbrication of these three domains. Locke, with his notion of prerogative power (a fourth kind of state power, separate from executive, judicial or legislative), also provides a reminder that liberalism always harbored a significant cache of political power in excess of democracy. [↩]
4. Anne Norton, Wild Democracy: Anarchy, Courage, and Ruling the Law (Oxford University Press, 2023), 63–81. [↩]