The Right’s Rollercoaster to Hell

who is in power, what do they want, what are they actually accomplishing

Part I: The Trump Regime

The far Right is fully in the saddle in the US. Much has been said about this, some of it wrong, some of it obvious, some of it insightful in ways that have scarcely been realized. It might be helpful to name a few of these points before getting into deeper analysis.

The first and second parts of this essay involve analyzing the State in its own terms, which may feel gross or even fatuous to many readers who care about collective survival and liberation. However, my intent is to go from there to show how a structural and strategic understanding of the Death Machine can improve our strategies for liberation.

• The Trump regime is scary. There is no doubt about this. I think these are the major factors:

  • The world itself is in a terrifying place. Capitalism is bludgeoning the planet to the point of bringing an end to the current geological epoch (and epochs usually change every few million years! This one only started 11,700 years ago!). The current world system¹ that organizes nearly everything about our miserable lives is also coming to an end. That might be good news, since every world system so far has been based on colonialism and misery, but the pessimism and uncertainty about what comes next is frightening.

  • Fear is a highly collective emotion. Progressives and centrists were much less worried about the exact same problems of deadly borders, killer cops, and the ecological crisis when one of their own was in power. Now, they’re getting completely alarmist even though Trump hasn’t made these particular problems worse. What does that have to do with fear? A bigger pool allows for bigger waves.

  • Trump team’s goal is to terrify people and flaunt far Right fetishes. In the case of deportations, Trump is lagging way behind Biden. In the case of fossil fuel consumption, Biden was terrible and the jury is still out on whether Trump will be worse. But, the unpredictability and aggressive rhetoric mean that neo-Nazis and hasten-the-apocalypse evangelists are salivating while immigrant communities are being terrified on a qualitatively more intense level, and uninformed environmentalists (the vast majority of environmentalists) are trembling in a closet with the lights out.

• Trump is still an absolute moron.

  • A great example came a week ago, when his relationship with Putin finally took a definitive turn, confirmed by policy decisions about arming Ukraine over the following days. Trump had this insightful explanation: “He’s very nice all the time, but it turns out to be meaningless” and “bullshit”.

  • In other words, after a full decade doing politics, including 4.5 years as freaking President of the United States, Trump has finally grasped one of the most elementary concepts of diplomacy. The many people out there kissing up to him might actually have their own agendas.

  • Up until this week, Trump was gratuitously giving Russia advantages in what had been NATO “spheres of influence,” for the low price of cheap flattery. In other words, getting playing, giving away a whole lot in return for a lot of nothing.

  • But also…

• Trump’s team is much more competent this time around than it was four years ago.

  • Being an effective Trump-whisperer is now a certified profession, so there is continuity, a self-replicating team around Trump with a methodology for handling him, to the extent that he can be handled.

  • The Trump team has some understanding of how government works, which they did not last time around, severely limiting the policy changes they were able to make.

  • How much understanding remains to be seen. I think it largely comes down to our interpretation of Musk and DOGE, which was embarrassingly ineffective at accomplishing real budget cuts.

  • My interpretation is that Musk—himself a total fuckwit megalomaniac—was an ally of convenience for Trump, pushing the bounds of executive power, frightening liberals by assaulting the evil institutions they hold dear, scoring quick points, and maintaining the loyalty of his base with quick post-inaugural action, because this time around Trump and Co. understand that major, controversial legislation takes at least, say, 6 months to pass, with a lot of back-and-forth and a lot of compromise. Musk’s hyperbolic budget-slashing campaign created the illusion that Trump was accomplishing his goals right out the gate.

  • In other words, Trump and Co. are still light years behind brilliant statesmen like the genocidal Henry Kissinger, but they have an understanding of government equivalent to a frat bro red district congressman working alongside an experienced but mediocre Beltway-insider…

  • However, this mid competence is added to one of the very few kinds of intelligence that Trump actually possesses, though one born wholly from his sense of entitlement: a knowledge that either when a system is shaky or when there is a lot of quick money to be made, someone with power can set the rules on fire and then brag about it. Trump can indeed shoot somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue “and not lose any voters.”

  • Being able to operate within the system and also attack parts of the system that are an impediment gives Trump a force-multiplying effect.

  • But also also…

• Trump has no coherent policy.

  • He has a strong preference for unilateral negotiations and bullying tactics over large, stable alliances and agreements like NATO and NAFTA, even when those alliances/agreements form a major basis of US power.

  • However, he doesn’t have a developed alternative proposal for US foreign policy, just a method that involves the US flexing its muscles in a way that actually leaves the US in a weaker position.

  • As for domestic policy, he is reducing access to social services like health care, and exacerbating a budgetary crisis that could wreck the US economy in a lasting way, upsetting both the working class and the wealthy. I don’t think Trump has a basic grasp of macroeconomics. He seems to think he can create free money through good branding, which sort of worked for his real estate business, though that also is a figure of exaggeration (he would be much richer if he’d just given his inheritance to investors rather than trying to be a business mogul). It won’t fully translate to the trillion dollar industry of keeping the US afloat.

  • Trump has become the first anti-liberal president in US history, though much of his team and on some days Trump himself do not want to destroy most liberal institutions, so much as bully and renegotiate with them. However, this doesn’t constitute a policy. I think we have yet to see any real proposals for the institutions that would replace a fundamentally liberal order.

What does all this mean on a deeper level?

Part II: the role of the Right
…

This was Part I of “The Right’s Rollercoaster to Hell.” (See? I told you I was working on longer pieces!) Since the whole essay is pretty long, I’m going to release it in parts. I’ll release Part II next week! For anyone who wants more reading right now, here are some earlier newsletters you might have missed. Have a great weekend!

A brief photo essay on surviving all this ugliness and despair:

Facts and research relevant for anyone who is confronting the mainstream take on climate change:

(I published Part 2 to the above article on April 4 this year, “Rooted Networks,” you can find it on the website)

This one is on the “protest movement” the institutional Left thought could mobilize us:

and this last one can be helpful to go back and see what the future looked like from a year and a half ago:

1. I’m going to provide a deeper exploration of the world system, and world systems theory, in a future newsletter. If you don’t want to wait, check out this anarchist critique, “Anarchy in World Systems Theory”