A Modern Counterrevolution

[Celerity]

https://www.theideasletter.org/essay/a-modern-counterrevolution/


A demonstrator is arrested by police during a protest outside of a House Committee on Un-American Activities hearing in San Francisco on May 14, 1960. © Bettmann/Getty



In a blizzard of executive orders and emergency declarations, President Donald Trump has taken a hatchet to the American government and the global order. He is wrecking the administrative state, shuttering entire agencies and departments, laying off federal workers, firing inspectors general. He is deporting permanent residents for speech protected by the First Amendment, revoking visas from international students, sending immigrants to the military camp at Guantánamo Bay and a mega-prison in El Salvador, and trying to eliminate birthright citizenship. He is defunding research universities and attacking the legal profession. He is threatening draconian tariffs on the country’s closest allies and neighbors, demeaning their leaders, and pulling the United States out of longstanding international commitments. Every day, he launches another unprecedented offensive or changes course; he creates ambiguity and fuels confusion, leaving his critics to second-guess themselves while giving himself cover.

He remains extremely popular with his base, even if his overall ratings have dropped to record lows. His critics, though, attack him six ways from Sunday. They call him a fascist, an authoritarian, a tyrant, the kleptocratic tool of tech billionaires, a profiteer, a reality-TV impostor, the embodiment of toxic masculinity, a bully. Yet none of these labels fully captures the scope or the coherence of what is happening in the U.S. today. These diagnoses focus too much on the individual, and this is an individual who, like a virtuoso illusionist, keeps his audience mesmerized by the spectacle but distracted from what is really going on. The radical developments underway must be placed in deeper perspective. Not just because so many of them were prefigured in the 900-page Project 2025 blueprint but also because much larger forces have powered the rise of far-right leaders across the globe.

In fact, the Trump II administration represents the demolition phase of a new offensive in a decades-long counterrevolution. The conservative activist Christopher Rufo said in a recent interview with the New York Times: “What we’re doing is really a counter revolution. It’s a revolution against revolution.” Mr. Rufo added: “I think that actually we are a counter radical force in American life that, paradoxically, has to use what many see as radical techniques.” In effect, President Trump’s actions during the first hundred days of his second mandate are the latest episode in a vast and coherent modern counterrevolution with a longer historical arc and a broader global reach.

Consider Marx’s argument in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. The rise of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte in 1848, Marx claimed, was not simply a “great man” story; instead, it demonstrated “how the class struggle in France created circumstances and relationships that made it possible for a grotesque mediocrity to play a hero’s part.” The sentence’s humor should not obscure its theoretical thrust. Likewise, our diagnosis of President Trump today must focus on the broader social conflicts and economic forces that are propelling history at a global level, not on the rise of any one individual—even if he resembles a grotesque mediocrity. I don’t want to minimize the extravagance or the radical nature of President Trump’s daily spectacles—what Marx referred to, speaking of Louis-Napoléon, as his “coups d’état en miniature every day.” But instead of focusing on the daily sleights of hand, it is important to understand, first, the broader strategies that motivate them and, then, their larger historical context.



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