No, Trump 2.0 is not anti-democratic; it’s pre-democratic
Post-January 20 AoS Chronicle, No. 2
Herewith the second in the Post-Age of Spectacle Chronicle series. (The first appeared on February 11, the only “paid subscribers-only” post with a teaser paywall so far. No. 2 is free to everyone; future Post-Age of Spectacle Chronicle posts…..well, I don’t know yet.)
One reason for this post is to present some copy added to my Age of Spectacle manuscript since the last installment, No. 45, ran on February 28. As I go through the manuscript yet again I find stepping over my January 20, 2025 timeline drawn in the sand to be occasionally irresistible. I suspected that one such incident, from three days ago, might be of interest to Raspberry Patchers.
Otherwise by way of related throat-clearing I have one publication elsewhere to report, as is my custom: “The End of NATO, or the Sixth Impossible Thing,” Quillette, March 1, 2025.
Mostly laudatory comment has ensued from this; only one person disputed the premise, a self-declared Sixties Hippie, who argued back at me that NATO sure does still exist and will continue to do so. All we’ve seen lately, he claimed, is just Trump’s way, looking to be successful at last, of pushing the Europeans to do what they need to do but have always managed to resist doing. He mentioned nothing about the alliance flip summarily achieved by shedding democratic Europe for the tender embrace of Putin’s Russia in the process of betraying Ukraine. He probably did not suspect even a day before that on March 3--just Monday morning--the White House would order an immediate halt to all aid for Ukraine, bottling up about $1 billion worth of materiel in the pipeline. I did; I was sure as I wrote on February 28 that such a White House order was close to hand, and would soon also sever Ukrainian use of (Polish-funded in this case) Starlink. That happened on Wednesday. He probably thinks, too, if he is a typical unreconstructed Sixties Hippie, that the Vietnam antiwar movement successfully shortened the war and saved lives when it in fact did no such thing….but never mind….we’re not going through that again, at least not now.[1]
***
On March 4, so three days ago, The Bulwark ran a piquant essay by Justin Glawe entitled “Vulture Capitalism Comes for Democracy.” By all means read it for yourself; if a subject like this can be comfortingly written, he has done it. The only flaw in this otherwise very fine essay was the title that adorned it, which was an editor’s doing, not the author’s. Why a flaw?
Because nearly all species of vultures eat what is already dead; vampires eat what is still alive and by so doing transform it. So Glawe was really describing the state-infiltrated vampire capitalism we are seeing in the second Trump Administration, not vulture capitalism, because not only is the live victim feeding the predator, but is in danger of losing its democratic soul. It is in danger of becoming an appendage of, in this case, a form of predatory reverse corporatism in which oligopoly takes control of, emasculates, and instrumentalizes a once-democratic government—a public trust—for its own private purposes.
Let’s now go a bit beyond Mr. Glawe’s account to more fully contextualize his point so as to make it, well, more pointed.
As my friend Eric Edelman recently reminded me, Presidents don’t change once entered into the Oval Office; they just think the same, only larger. President Trump has been a real estate developer—also a reality-TV star and WWF shill before that—and so he remains all those things, only larger. Trump’s theatrical talents inhere in his performative Ripley-like/two-headed carnival cow somersaulting mendacity, to press Age of Spectacle language into service. We saw it televised from the Oval Office at the end of last month, and truth to tell we see it nearly every day if we deign to look. (I recommend therapeutically useful periods of not looking, if you can manage it.) But the point here to be explicated is not about Trump as grifter “magnifico” smoke-and-mirrors up-is-down shamanist, but about Trump the businessman.
Donald Trump knows no model for thinking about large organizations other than that of a private for-profit business that he himself owns and more or less operates. So he thinks of himself now the same, only larger. He is currently CEO, and Elon Musk, he thinks, is CFO of this entity, otherwise known as the U.S. Federal Government. As is common in such cases, and as Glawe describes happening to a local newspaper he worked for some years ago, Trump and his associates are now busily cutting costs in anticipation of stripping or re-purposing what is left of the “business” for their own money-making uses. Corporate raiders have claimed in the past that this is a very efficient thing to do because it gets rid of accumulated waste and fat and makes capital assets more productive. Sometimes this has been true. Usually, however, it has just been a pretext for legal greed.
The elected seizure of the U.S. Federal government by corporate-brain types promises a particularly 21st-century form of corporatism—by which is meant generally a tight conjunction of government and big business—constructed from the outside in, as with any garden-variety hostile takeover. This form of corporatism has been made possible by the combined advent of the cyberlutional Net Effect[2] and post-Cold War globalization: Government redacted, so to speak, and reconfigured for the purpose of looting both the domestic and global commons for the benefit of its masters—and to hell with everyone else, the “losers” upon whom the newly enthroned oligarchs will punch down at and for their pleasure. Thanks to its penetration and abduction of a large state apparatus this constitutes a potential form of stationary banditry on a scale that not even the late Mancur Olson, brilliant as he was, could have imagined.[3]
Hence Trump’s wild notion of replacing the Internal Revenue Service with an External Revenue Service based on tariff revenue, and other mathematically absurdist inanities—like the new Crypto Strategic Reserve that has redefined downward the meaning of conflict-of-interest corruption. Hence also the unprecedented criminal theft of personal data on a few hundred million American citizens from the Treasury Department by individuals and directed by an individual with no formal governmental authority whatsoever.
None of this makes any sense if government is viewed as a public trust and leadership as an avocation in service to a citizenry. It all makes sense, however, if government as a public trust is viewed as an obstacle to feeding the maw of endless private greed, the citizenry reduced pretty much to Eloi with debit cards manipulated as though “moist robots” by algorithmic designs.
All of it, too, reflects President Trump’s complete failure to grasp—or to care about if he does grasp it—what a government is, and what a democratic one is supposed to do. It is, as philosophers like to say, a category error—a real whopper of one, too. Trump is not alone in this: The cabinet of the second Trump Administration has an estimated net worth of about $460 billion, more than the entire GNP of most mid-sized countries, and by far the largest of any cabinet in U.S. history. Thirteen billionaire buddies of the President have political footing in the Administration, also by far a record high.[4] These billionaires and many other near-billionaires in their wake are likely not thinking of their government service as a form of charity or net sacrifice to their personal bottom lines.
This new form of 21st-century corporatism, if it sticks, has major implications not only for government but also for publicly owned, professionally managed corporations. The MAGA brain is sharply biased against the separation of corporate owners from managers, so it would be wrong to characterize it as generically pro-business. It is pro a particular kind of business, which comes in essentially a patrimonial form: personalistic, unfettered so capable of full-frontal ruthlessness, and family-heritable.[5]
To understand more deeply what is happening it is not enough to note what is new about a government reconfiguring itself for the purpose of maximum feasible looting. It is just as important, maybe more so, to understand what is old about it. The nature of what we are seeing may be unprecedented, as befits the aforementioned unprecedented technological environment that forms its context. But the basic socio-political dynamic of it is very old. It is so old that we can read about a variety of it in fictional manqué, if we like.
***
Alan Breck, Charles Edward Stuart, James of the Glen, and the “Red Fox” Colin Campbell of Glenure are four of the historical figures that reappear in Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 classic novel Kidnapped. Stevenson wrapped the real history of his beloved Scotland in a novel, and in so doing he distorted rather less of that history than he might have. In any event, given the readership he was aiming at in his day, he could assume a great deal. Indeed, in late-19th century Britain all literate people knew the relevant history of the Scottish Jacobin uprising of 1715, its final ill-fated repetition in 1745-46, and the assassination in 1752—the once famous Appin Murder case—of Colin Campbell, who had been operating as the English royal estates Factor extracting rents from the defeated Scottish clans. Here, in drastically brief summation, is what they all knew.
After the Battle of Culloden in April 1746, the English sharply accelerated the process of Scottish “enclosures”—a.k.a. the Highland Clearances—begun already after 1715. New landed estates, formed from common-law Scottish clan possessions dating back centuries, were awarded as royal grants to favorites, functionaries, cousins, and in-law of the new post-Stuart Hanoverian dynasty that had arisen in the 1701 Act of Settlement. At a time when wealth was near synonymous with land, this amounted to a hostile takeover of the Scottish clan confederacy, in this case sped up partly out of vengeance after a blood-soaked battlefield victory. The essence of it was that the wealthiest of the realm seized value from the defenestrated Scots with the support of a dynastic, patrimonial state, led at the time by King George II.
The parallel with the present is imperfect on several points, but for our purposes the key historical question is this: Who was really in charge in early Hanoverian times, the politically powerful dynasts or the very wealthy? They were not identical. The dynasty was relatively new; the wealth was old. Even in hindsight it is not easy to sort the relevant power dynamics as time rolled along.
Those few Americans who know this history—mainly some of Scottish decent who can recall from it the origin of their own families’ journeys to North America—can easily see parallels. The other 99.44 percent of We the People today maybe not so much without some help. The American Founders’ generation, however, knew this history well; yet in a way their progeny was complicit in a variation of it in yet another marriage of private capital and state power at the expense of Native Americans. The arrangement was so common in that day that not even a supposed Empire of Liberty could devise a wholly different modus operandi.
The situations of 18th-century Britain and 21st-century America also differ in one other particularly noteworthy detail. The Scots, both high-born and low, knew exactly what was happening to them at the time during the first half of the 18th century. In our current case, rightwing populists have featured, so far, as mostly clueless stage props for this most recent hostile takeover, most of them actually believing that Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and the rest of the elite-business vampires collected in the current Administration give a damn about them. They think that in large part because agreement does exist on what they loathe in common: wokeness, DEI, and the evolved post-New Deal, post-Great Society bureaucratized meliorism of the American state. But this agreement on cultural negatives functions as a distraction from the profound misalignment of their respective material interests….which are becoming more evident by the day.
Remember the Umberto Eco quote from his 2011 novel The Prague Cemetery, brought in Chapter 3 of The Age of Spectacle text, about France circa 1852—and brought to readers of The Raspberry Patch as warning months before November 5, 2024: “The scoundrel has carried out an authoritarian coup d’état by appealing to the ignorant mob!” To those who do recall it, let me ask: Is the point, perhaps a bit obscure to some seven months ago, vivid enough for you now? This is not your father’s, or your grandfather’s, capitalism that we see arising. It is for practical purposes modeled on much older patterns of predatory zero-sum inspired engagement that, just bye the bye, the erstwhile Adam Smith understood, and decried, when his book The Wealth of Nations was published in 1776. Smith was a Scotsman, you know.
Now take a look at the guy in the photo just below. That there is a Scotsman—not a fig of a doubt about it. That there happens to be my wife’s paternal great-great-grandfather Alexander Taylor, born on April 17, 1830.
Alexander is now a hearty and healthy 194-year old, still with the kilt, still with the sword, he’s as brave as Alan Breck ever was, and he still harbors unstinting hostility toward rapacious Germans whether originally from Hanover or Kallstadt. So watch your back, Orange Donnie; Alexander knows where you live. (I learned recently that President Trump’s paternal grandfather Fred Trump, an immigrant from Bavaria, once ran a brothel in Whitehorse during the Klondike Gold Rush…..Why am I not surprised by this information?)
* * *
As already suggested, corporatism defined as the marriage of coercion-backed political power to economic power, otherwise expressible as the marriage of state and oligarchy, is as old as dirt. But not all examples are created equal. Sometimes corporatism has reflected the complete or less than complete oligopolistic domination of government, otherwise Plato would not have identified oligopoly as a pure form of regime in Book VIII of The Republic. Otherwise, too, Robert Michel’s 1911 “iron law of oligarchy” and William Graham Sumner’s slightly earlier analysis of the evolving industrial political economy in the United States would make no sense, and they do make sense. But sometimes it has reflected government domination and instrumentalization of corporate entities, sometimes with corporate assent and sometimes not so much, as was the case in 20th-century examples of fascism. Both forms, however, are much older than the mid-18th century setting of Kidnapped.
History displays so many variations on the corporatist theme that the broad category must be reckoned far more organic to history than any classical liberal arrangement in which the two parts are kept institutionally and legally separated. Every ancient empire in the Near East, South Asia, East Asia, Central America, and the Andes looked something like a corporatist regime. Social structures were usually tribal, summing to an apex patrimonial state in the lead creating and/or suborning oligarchical wealth as its financing adjunct.
Toward the end of the 15th century that basic model endured even though tribal social structures had evolved into larger proto-national societies. Remember that Christopher Columbus—that’s Cristoffa Corombo to his Genoese parents—was sponsored by the Spanish royal house. Not long afterwards modern corporations were nearly all originally extensions of the state and its nobility before private versions came into existence. Some of the better known cases over time, even to history-allergic Americans, include the Hudson Bay Company, the East India Company, the South Africa Company that became Rhodesia, and Mozambique Company, a Portuguese venture that wobbled even into the 20th century.
But in that same century other, hybrid cases could be found. The trading city-state of Venice thrived due to the relative vastness of its maritime trade network and its unparalleled shipbuilding capabilities—an early modern example of a Net Effect phenomenon—lorded over by the real and original Doge, a political leader elected by the city’s merchant oligarchs. That was less corporatism with government in the lead, with what would be called today a comprehensive industrial policy, and more the Venetian oligarchy calling the shots. Elon Musk named his initially illegal, now hastily jerry-rigged semi-legal, government office the DOGE, standing for Department of Governmental Efficiency, reportedly taking the name from a canine play-on-words for a crypto-currency. Musk apparently had no idea that the word bears an apt historical allusion to his own office because he seems never to have read any book of a humanities or social science nature. What he did at Penn while he earned a double degree in the mid-1990s from the College and Wharton is anyone’s guess.[6]
Clearly, all Western forms of ordered liberty in market settings—classical liberalism, in other words—where government and big business are separated institutionally and legally, are the novelties. Amid these novelties of political economy modern liberal democracy became possible. All examples of mature corporatism, no matter from which direction a species of it comes into being, whether leaning toward the fascistic or toward the ultra-libertarian, are unfriendly to democratic self-government. They are elitist and politically exclusionary by nature because power is defined exclusively by possession, and that de facto rules out notions such as equality before the law, which is the lynchpin of a genuine functioning democracy. Any democratic system that tilts too far toward corporatism, of any type, puts its democratic order under pressure and, ultimately, if left uncorrected, puts it at risk.
***
Back to pre-modern Britain: The ambiguity that shrouds attempts to typologize historical examples of corporatism is illustrated, as well, by the variously told tales of Robin Hood, for history ever produces literary doppelgangers of its vicissitudes. Just as Sir Walter Scott knew and used themes in these stories, so did Mr. Stevenson a generation or so afterwards.
Dating back to the selfsame 15th century, some versions over the years have depicted Robin of Loxley as a radical libertarian fighting a rapacious state while others make him out to be a socialist revolutionary fighting rapacious oligarchs. It’s a false dichotomy emerged from contemporary efforts to deploy history to make contemporary arguments: In 15th century England, and most everywhere else in Europe then still emerging from feudalism after the Black Death, wealth based on land and power based largely on the Crown’s relationship to the Church invariably combined to prey upon the peasantry even while it protected it from both external threats and internecine feuding. This alliance of stationary banditry was near universal in that day, and not just in Europe. The fact that more or less on the eve of the Reformation a new set of relationships could be imagined from factors that themselves shaped the Reformation—the invention of movable type, for one example of several—is probably what explains the emergence of the Robin Hood story in the first place and its enduring popularity thereafter.
The second Trump Administration shows every early sign, as of March 2025, of wanting to bring a very old arrangement back into play. In classical Platonic regime terms it looks like oligarchy. But it also bears elements of a militant, honor-inflected timocracy—again in classic language taken from The Republic—in President Trump’s neo-imperialist appetites for Greenland, Canada, and Panama. The notion of creating a shipbuilding office in the Executive Branch suggests that the President is well versed in the history of Venice. (That’s a joke, relax.)
In any event, Trump’s quest to project nationalist honor designed to inspire the volk, by use if necessary of military force, raises an important historical aspect of corporatism. As Randolph Bourne famously asserted, “war is the Health of the State.” So a new American imperialism, no less than using the power ministries of the Federal government to attack his political adversaries, would aggrandize state power, while everything about the DOGEified aspects of the administration aims to eviscerate it. If, how, and how long these contradictory impulses can cohabit in a single administration are interesting questions.
The key point question, however, amid the frenetic incoherence of the second Trump Administration so far, is also the most mysterious one. The Administration clearly wants to rejoin the old pairing of great wealth and great power, with the former kicking back lucre to the latter, and cut the majority of ever-fleeced citizens out of the action. Yet no ideology as such, at least as we commonly understand the word, can be discerned here, only a pastiche of emotional tics unified, to the extent they are, by Ortega y Gasset’s “reason of unreason.” That seems the best way to account for how authoritarian methods can be pressed into the service of radical libertarian ends. Thus the MAGA brain, such as it is, is not so much thoughtfully anti-democratic as it is thoughtlessly pre-democratic.
How to account for this odd situation? Well, dear reader, if you have assimilated the gist of the Age of Spectacle argument, you already know or at least suspect the answer: The new orality presages the reversion to the mythic consciousness, and that consciousness does not resonate with the impersonal formal and written authority of the Weberian state. It rather resonates with a different Weberian authority form: charismatic authority. That form of preliterate authority cannot sustain rule of law; it can sustain only rule by law, behind which is no shared sense of moral community, only the para-cultic authority of the shaman-cum-leader.
It is therefore no accident, as the Marxists used to say, that the main priority of the early second Trump Administration has been to avoid, disobey, and prospectively destroy the formal rule of law; it is therefore also no accident that its body language is so thoroughly non-democratic; and, last for now, it is no surprise, really, that it has alienated the democracies of Europe to embrace a 21st-century Russia, a country whose political culture, notwithstanding the slogans and banners of the Communist era, never moved entirely past a patrimonial order to a genuinely formal Weberian one.
***
In the first Post-Age of Spectacle Chronicle essay from February 11, entitled “White Magic at the National Archives,” we had some fun with Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland’s novel The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. The novel—to repeat for those just joining The Raspberry Patch revelry—features witch-aided time travel wherein our noble unwitchy heroes endeavor to subtly alter the past to redound to their sponsors’ advantage in the present. What we have here, as we close on the seventh week of the second Trump Administration, is the suspicion that unseen witches in the present have conspired to send reality itself back into the past! It is as if an assumed open-ended future speeding us along has suddenly smashed into a funhouse mirror that is now bouncing us backwards into some vague but definitely premodern political swamp.
If that doesn’t explain the acute disorientation many of us feel right now—and of course it doesn’t…..it’s just a novel—then what does? Not to worry, only to wait; The Raspberry Patch will be back next Friday.
[1] If for some reason you want to anyway, go back to The Raspberry Patch’s first post on October 2—you’ll find there a summary of one of my old books on precisely this subject.
[2] If you are new to The Age of Spectacle argument and associated vocabulary, look into the Substack archive to find reference to and definition of “The Net Effect.”
[3] The reference is to Mancur Olson, “Dictatorship, Democracy, and Development,” American Political Science Review 87:3 (1993). Professor Olson passed away in 1998.
[4] See Peter Charalambous, Laura Romero, and Soo Rin Kim, “Trump has tapped an unprecedented 13 billionaires for his administration. Here’s who they are,” ABC News, December 17, 2024.
[5] See Adrian Wooldridge, “MAGA Wants to End Capitalism as We Know It,” Bloomberg Opinion, March 6, 2025.
[6] For one guess see Sophia Powell, “Former classmates, girlfriend of Elon Musk reflect on his time at Penn,” The Daily Pennsylvanian, November 3, 2022.