Goodbye Peggy Sue

Trump 2’s final destination may not be to MAGA’s taste

“Just tell me how things will end up!”

After two months of upheaval, there’s a touch of this sentiment, articulated by the economist Mohamed El-Erian, in all of us.

There is no shortage of explanations for the strange blend of chaos and purpose that characterises Trump 2. They range from the geostrategic to the psychological, from the scholarly to the meme. We all can shoot one off, as the mood takes us. But they all feel fragmentary to me and the overall effect is kaleidoscopic – dazzling and intriguing but not providing anything approaching an answer.

In search of an answer, this article considers five competing theories. Consider it a report from the front line of political science: does anyone know what’s going on?

1. Business as usual

There is a business-as-usual view of American politics right now that goes like this.

Republicans have the trifecta of control of the presidency and both houses of Congress. This gives Trump wide latitude to pursue whatever agenda he wants. Some of what he’s doing may be outside his powers, but the courts will rein him in. Even if he ignores the courts sometimes, that’s not without precedent in the US.

His policymaking may look chaotic but there is a logic to it. For decades the US has been asking the Europeans nicely to up their defence spending – he’s finally making them do it. For a long time, the US has also been asking China nicely to reorient its economy towards domestic demand for consumer goods – he’s finally put them in a position where they may be forced to do it.

The chaos was already costing him popularity. The economic hit from tariffs is going to be much worse for him and the mid-term elections are coming. In 15 months’ time, faced with losing a swathe of seats, Republicans will break ranks en masse and power will evaporate. He’s on his way to being a lame duck.

2. Authoritarianism

The individual elements of business-as-usual view can’t be dismissed but the picture as a whole is deceptively reassuring. It lulls us into assuming that America is still fundamentally the same country it was three months ago. As well as the protesters who turned out in significant numbers in many American towns and cities yesterday, another group of people who aren’t buying that are the political scientists who have tracked the fall of democracy in a series of countries over the past 30 years. Their first take on the new administration was articulated by Steven Levitzky and Lucan Way. Trump was about to take the US down the road to a half-way house between democracy and authoritarianism, which they called competitive authoritarianism. “Even in a worst-case scenario, Trump will not be able to … overturn the constitutional order,” they wrote. “There will be elections in 2028, and Republicans could lose them.”

This made them the pessimists two months ago. Now they are even more pessimistic and not sure of how much of democracy in the US can survive. “If this continues, Trump will be able to do far more damage than I recently thought possible,” Levitsky said last week.

Thomas Zimmer, a historian at Georgetown University, has gone into more detail, basing his analysis on a careful examination of the extent to which the picture painted by Levitzky and Way is holding up. It goes like this.

Levitzky and Way based their assessment on the trajectory followed in other countries that have slid from democracy into some kind of partial authoritarianism, especially Victor Orbán’s Hungary. From this, and unlike many others in the US and elsewhere, they could see where Trump was going. However, they also thought the US had stronger defences than other countries and that, since Trump’s approval ratings were only middling, he would find it harder to make progress.

Two factors have upturned this assessment, for both Zimmer and Levitzky. First, the institutions that Levitzky was counting on to resist Trump’s push have been ineffective. Second, no other country has had the equivalent of Elon Musk and the techies in his Department of Government Efficiency; they have made unprecedented progress in dismantling the established state apparatus. Where does it end, Zimmer asks:

Donald Trump is “unlikely to consolidate authoritarian rule,” Levitsky and Way argue. Every time I read the piece, every time I think about their assessment, I stumble over this sentence. I am more pessimistic.

Levitsky and Way identify potential sources of resilience in the United States and focus on certain institutions (in the broadest sense) they argue are comparatively stronger than what Orbán had to overcome in Hungary or Erdogan in Turkey: “An independent judiciary, federalism, bicameralism, and midterm elections – all absent in Hungary, for instance – will likely limit the scope of Trump’s authoritarianism.”

I struggle with this assessment – and with every week that passes, I am more inclined to disagree. Which is not at all the same as saying I think we should dismiss it.

…

As concrete examples, the authors refer to Brazil and South Korea. But must we not already assume that America is, unfortunately, on a very different track? In South Korea, the autocratic coup was defeated by fierce resistance from the legislature – which is basically unimaginable in America right now; in Brazil, the justice system is actually holding Bolsonaro accountable, and we know that ship has already sailed over here.

Even the strengths are weaknesses. For example, the federal structure vests a lot of power in the states but this brings with it the risk of civil conflict as the military decays into factions.

3. Patrimonialism as a regime

But maybe the concept of authoritarianism, a bedrock of political science for decades, is not up to the job any more. One alternative concept that has been put forward is patrimonialism. As Francis Fukuyama explains it:

Max Weber used the term “patrimonial” to describe virtually every pre-modern regime once mankind graduated from decentralized tribalism. That is, the government was considered to be an extension of the ruler’s family and household. Such systems evolved out of conquest, in which the chief of a victorious band of raiders distributed land, resources, and women to his fellow warriors, who were then free to hand down those properties to their descendants.

I am primed to think that patrimonialism has something to it because I have struggled with the concept of authoritarianism in the past. Five years ago, I attempted to describe the way institutional relationships had been subverted by personal ones in the government of Boris Johnson in the UK, writing, “If I had to explain British politics today to a Martian I would start with the prime minister at the centre. Around him there is not the cabinet or the civil service, but a court in which access is prized above all else.” And it neatly explains why the Defense Secretary taking his wife to classified meetings is not necessarily a mistake.

Fukuyama and the researchers he is relying on, Stephen Hanson and Jeffrey Kopstein see patrimonialism as a type of regime. As Fukuyama says, in such a system, there is no distinction between public and private; everything in theory belongs to the ruler. So what he is foreshadowing is a regime in the US that echoes that in Russia. Just as everything in Russia is in Vladimir Putin’s gift, so everything in America would be in Trump’s gift.

Fukuyama gives no timeline for getting to that, so maybe the American Putin wouldn’t be Trump but one of the younger Trumps or JD Vance. Even so, and even after all the turmoil of the past couple of months, it’s a stunningly alarming prospect from one of the world’s leading political scientists.

One of the things in favour of this view is that Fukuyama, Hanson and Kopstein can trace a wave of patrimonial regimes spreading out from Russia since Putin began to re-order Russia in that way. One of the things against it, as a way of understanding, is that it seems to miss a lot of what is going on now. For example, much of what Trump is achieving is achieved through executive orders that are straightforwardly legal and require no patronage.

4. Patrimonialism as way to personalize power

A less flattening approach can be found in Xavier Marquez, who thinks of patrimonialism instead as one of three mechanisms that a leader can use to advance the personalization of power once they have taken possession of the executive, for example by being elected president. These three mechanisms again can be traced back to Max Weber and each allows a leader to escape accountability through different means. They are:

• the mobilization of charisma – using emotional connections with followers to undermine formal institutional constraints

• the mobilization of legality or formal authority – using legal discourses and procedures to expand formal executive powers

• the mobilization of informal authority – leaders occupying strategic positions in patronage networks to undermine or expand formal authority (patrimonialism).

It seems to me that Trump is using all these strategies to expand his power:

• Charismatic – via his personal presence on social media and TV screens, he encourages his followers to intimidate the families of judges and anyone else who frustrates his ambitions

• Legal – through his executive orders and the suppression of Congress’s previous role, he acquires new powers

• Informal – he is establishing networks of patronage throughout the government bureaucracy.

The variety in these mobilisations is disorienting. We’re used to the person in front of us claiming at most one of them. And the disorienting variety runs through the whole of Trump 2. For example, it is manifested in the text of the executive orders Trump has been signing. Carlos Lozada, who’s read them all, reports that, “…stylistically, they veer from formal policy pronouncement to campaign speech to social media diatribe, sometimes all within the same text”. If you’re dazed and confused, it’s not just from Trump’s rambling speeches – the dissonance is baked into his entire approach to government.

Scrutiny of each kind of mobilisation yields another part of the picture.

The threat of violence against Trump’s opponents is real, as demonstrated by the attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband and the January 6 attack on the Capitol. This time round, Trump has again tinged his charismatic appeals with the threat of violence. He has removed the protection provided to Joe Biden’s adult children, making them easier targets, and targeted a judge who ruled against him.

The mobilisation of legal authority is not merely an exercise in concretely seizing hold of powers that already exist in principle, and sometimes crossing the line that divides legal from illegal. Rather, it is an attempt to remove the line altogether. It is an attempt to re-fashion the law along Ausitinian lines, as something that is no more than the obligation on everyone else to obey the commands Trump issues. Lozada highlights executive order 14215, Ensuring Accountability for All Agencies, which provides Trump’s answer to the question of what happens when defence of the Constitution and fidelity to the executive come into conflict. He writes:

“The Constitution vests all executive power in the president and charges him with faithfully executing the laws,” the order begins. It goes on to criticize independent regulatory agencies for operating “without sufficient accountability to the president, and through him, to the American people.” The implication is that only the president — and not, say, the people’s elected representatives in Congress — embodies the popular will, and that this unmediated relationship with the people grants him unprecedented power.

The order explains how civil servants should interpret the laws they have sworn to uphold. The short answer: Don’t bother.

The slightly longer answer: “The president and the attorney general, subject to the president’s supervision and control, shall provide authoritative interpretations of law for the executive branch,” and those interpretations are “controlling” on all federal workers, the order states. “No employee of the executive branch acting in their official capacity may advance an interpretation of the law as the position of the United States that contravenes the president or the attorney general’s opinion on a matter of law.”

This executive order is issued only to government employees at work, but the same principle lies behind the moves to quash the independence of courts and lawyers. It can easily be extended to the whole of society and, rhetorically at least, frequently is by both Trump and Musk.

The mobilisation of informal authority is advancing quickly thanks to the speed with which Musk has been able to wrest control from the previous collection of bureaucrats. Talk of efficiency, rooting out corruption and rewriting legacy COBOL code with AI is strictly for the birds, but he is proving adept at replacing their guys with our guys, the first part of which is getting rid of their guys.

The machinery of government has been on a journey. In the beginning, on the medieval pattern of offices, officials had wide discretion. Gradually, they become constrained ever-more tightly by rules. In the US, the rules are more numerous and exact than anywhere. In recent years, more and more of the rules have been encoded into software and the role of many bureaucrats has become a mixture of tending to the machine – dealing with edge cases – and providing the machine with a human face. This painstaking systematisation, or “tech”, has made the bureaucrats themselves now dispensable – if you don’t care about the edge cases and the human face. Software has made the bureaucracy itself legible. For this reason, Musk’s playbook is sure to be followed elsewhere.

Caveats

However, even with Marquez’s richer approach, I still think there’s two elements missing from the patrimonial account – discipline and oligarchy.

In the patrimonial account, the power and the discipline always flow from the top down. For example, Hanson and Kopstein write:

In a leader-centered political order, whatever the boss says, no matter how outlandish, sets the agenda for every underling. In fact, the willingness of subordinates to parrot and defend even the most extreme parts of his stated agenda is one of the most important signs of regime loyalty, used by the leader to decide on promotions, demotions, and in cases of open criticism, retribution.

This gets at something important. We are seeing a purge of officials perceived as disloyal, exactly as proposed back in 2012 by Curtis Yarvin, one of Peter Thiel’s and JD Vance’s favourite concept-generators. As Gil Duran has pointed out, the idea of RAGE (Retire All Government Employees) was to gut the federal bureaucracy and replace civil servants with political loyalists who would answer to a CEO-type leader. Since expanded and fleshed out, Yarvin’s is an approach that Elon Musk is plainly channelling without fulfilling its most grandiose ambitions, such as handing absolute sovereignty to a single organization with the kind of powers the Allied occupation authorities held in Japan 1945; despite the chainsaw, Musk is not the dictator Yarvin yearned for.

But in the last few days Laura Loomer, a MAGA influencer, went into the White House and seems to have got six senior figures in the US security establishment fired, including Timothy Haugh, the general in charge of the National Security Agency, the cyber-espionage service. That’s bottom-up rather than top-down.

Similarly, much of the language used by Trump comes from the MAGA base. The importance of this dynamic is heightened if, like Fukuyama, you think Trump lacks ideological instincts of his own. So it’s a much more complicated picture than is allowed for in patrimonialism and the best account of it that I’ve seen, which integrates rather than discounting the base, is Eliot Higgins’ idea of disordered discourse. Such an approach explains how Trump can turn the world economy upside down with tariffs but, when his cabinet fans out to justify the move on TV, they all say different things – there is no definitive line because even the largest decisions are drenched in the rhetorical swirl of the MAGA base. Because it favours bullshit, this dynamic is a natural fit for Trump – a marriage that explains how, as Hanson and Koopstein note, Trump comes to spout so much political bullshit.

Equally, there is no room in the patrimonial account for truly oligarchic relationships in which the leader cedes certain domains to other oligarchs, not as a favour but as a recognition of a balance of power. This seems to miss the basic fact that Trump’s presidency is built on a coalition of MAGA and Silicon Valley oligarchs. In the patrimonial schema, no one – not even Musk or the other tech figures – is anything other than another underling.

5. Kleptocracy

A more complete picture of the situation today can be achieved by drawing on what we have learnt about kleptocracies, where the overlap with authoritarianism is well documented. Kleptocracies are associated with the instability of emerging markets, so thinking of the US this way explains how some investors are starting to look on the US as an emerging market gripped by “Caligula Capitalism”.

Thomas Mayne wrote a helpful paper for Chatham House in 2022 that described the difference between kleptocracy and oligarchy as follows: “Often oligarchs are seen as characteristic of Russia’s kleptocracy, but the Russia of the 1990s was not a kleptocracy as the oligarchs represented a power base outside of the Kremlin, one that Putin had to dismantle by exiling or jailing those who opposed him.”

This seems to articulate a trial of strength that Trump and the oligarchs of Silicon Valley have avoided by making an alliance. The tech-industrial complex that Joe Biden talked about has not been dismantled by Trump, but at the same time none of the Silicon Valley oligarchs stand against him. So we do not know what might emerge from a true opposition between them, as we may witness after the mid-terms if Trump’s candidates do badly and some oligarchs begin to position themselves for a Democrat presidency in 2028.

Mayne’s central analogy is that of a landlord:

The most successful kleptocracies are those which, rather than strip the house bare, occupy it and allow other members of the household to generate their own income while paying ‘rent’ to the landlord – the godfather-like head of state.

I think this works better than the family analogy in patrimonialism. The relationship between landlord and tenant is one of transaction, even if it may be inflected with favour. Also, a landlord has some responsibilities, to maintain the house, and Trump is a very diligent landlord; he is constantly working on building political capital (generating support, firing up the base, suppressing the opposition).

Like any analogy, it needs to be used with care. Unlike a straightforward kleptocracy, some of the tenants are pursuing not (or not only) money-making schemes but ideological ones. Hence the Trump-led war of position currently rampaging through government agencies, universities, the media, firms of lawyers and the rest of (another Weber concept) civil society. Unless the state as we know it is to be allowed to collapse, some must also be pursuing (another Weber concept) rational-bureaucratic objectives.

The Amazon, Meta and Google guys in the front row at Trump’s inauguration don’t need to go into the house. They have their own houses and primarily want to keep out of them unions and the world’s regulators and taxers, including both those now under Trump’s command and those in other countries that can be leaned on by him. The same is true of Oracle’s Larry Ellison. Musk is in a different position and to recoup his investment has to become a tenant in order to exploit the state via Tesla, Space X and Starlink, or – who knows – some new purely financial scam with crypto.

However, there is a distinctively tech-oligarchic dynamic not captured by the landlord analogy (or patrimony). Trump remains dependent on X, a platform where the key editorial decision of what content to show to which people is controlled by Musk. Unlike, say, Silvio Berlusconi when he grabbed power in Italy, Trump does not own or control the media he relies on. The arrangement between him and Musk (and Mark Zuckerberg, and others) is a genuinely oligarchic trade.

The Trump coalition is integrating rather than plundering the prime locus of wealth in the US, Silicon Valley. In doing so, it is securing for itself access to the media assets necessary (but not sufficient) for its perpetuation and this exchange and dependency makes the regime truly oligarchic.

6. Ideologies

The discussion above concerns the structures of power. Instead, we can consider the ideologies at play. However, in going down this road, there is one huge caveat: it is not clear that any of the people promoting the ideologies are sincere.

An oligarch is their own master and Machiavelli reminds us that a prince never lacks reasons. To an oligarch, ideology is naturally just another reason, convenient or not, to be deployed in pursuit of their goals.

Even pre-MAGA, Naomi Klein warned us of the deep cynicism of a Republican Party that adopts ideological positions not out of conviction but out of electoral utility.

There is now a well-trodden path from left-wing revolutionary steeped in Marxist theory to intellectual joker providing confusionist concepts-as-a-service to the cynical right. Klein’s ‘doppelganger’, Naomi Wolf, is one example. In the UK, such characters include the crew around the magazine Spiked, including Clare Fox, elevated to the House of Lords by Boris Johnson. More consequentially, it also includes Nick Land, ‘the godfather of accelerationism’, a vogue that was passé in the art world 10 years ago but has now found a much more lucrative home in Silicon Valley.

An accelerationist pile of bricks with smiley faces

In December, a fight broke out over H1B visas, a popular way for tech companies to bring additional skilled staff into the USA. On one side, Steve Bannon and long-time MAGA allies who portray the visas as undermining the prospects of native Americans. On the other side, Musk and the Silicon Valley types.

It is not obvious that these two parts of Trump’s coalition have anything in common other than a desire for power. The scope for conflict therefore is unlimited and so it is not surprising that JD Vance has recently made an effort to sketch out an argument that the two, rather than fighting, are natural bedfellows. This soothes passions, mentors the MAGA base in the “correct” form of thinking about this question and burnishes his own image as a resolving father figure who might one day take Trump’s place.

The political scientist Henry Farrell is more than sceptical. He believes the two are locked in normative antinomy. While Vance framed the two camps as the populist right and techno-optimists, Farrell sees the two becoming more extreme and veering into integralism and right-accelerationism:

It is not just that the American right is becoming more extreme, but that its extremism pulls in two radically different directions. One faction yearns to return to the cultural stability of a world in which everyone agrees (or is obliged to agree) on shared values, and the only legitimate arguments are about how best to achieve the worldly version of the kingdom of heaven. The other fantasizes about a radical acceleration of the forces of change, ripping society apart in the name of perpetual innovation. Moving towards the one means moving directly away from the other.

Right now, this tension seems crystal clear with Trump’s tariffs, justified in MAGA- and integralist-friendly terms, stripping hundreds of billions that would otherwise have been spent on R&D out of the Silicon Valley firms. In the terms of the widely-circulated justification of techno-optimism dashed off by the venture capitalist Mark Andreessen, or what is sometimes called effective accelerationism, Trump is now probably the biggest murderer in the history of humanity. A test of the cynicism, you could say, is whether any of the techno-optimists call Trump out.

Although it is not immediately obvious, right accelerationism brings us back to Max Weber.

Weber hypothesised a dynamic, the rationalisation thesis, that was constantly chewing up the present to make the future and so driving the evolution of society across the world. Relations between people, he argued, were becoming less “substantive” and more “rational”. Substantive – rooted in longstanding social bonds, as between husband and wife or lord and serf; rational – calculating, as between employer and employee. A contemporary close synonym for Weber’s “rational” is “transactional”, a word that has been used thousands of times to try to capture the way in which Trump 2 is different from previous US administrations.

Seen in this light, right-accelerationists are people who promote the rationalisation thesis as something that is morally good. This stance will again bring it into conflict with integralism, which always requires some substantive relationships, for example between family members. It also reminds us that the techno-optimism of AI-fuelled abundance at some point in the future is welded to the reality in the here and now of being chewed up, both in our individual lives and as states that may see tax revenues from earned income plummet.

The integralism is wrapped up with Christianity. Farrell again:

The simplest way of describing integralism is as the proposition that society ought [to] be shaped by agreement on a common good that in turn reflects Christian natural law. If you believe that God has told us how we should lead our lives, then shouldn’t our society and our government reflect these values? There will be complications and compromises - the City of God is not the City of Man - but still you ought [to] do what you can to build the worldly paradise.

What animates this vision is not simply the belief that there is a right way to order society, but the contention that that the radical plurality of modern liberalism is morally wrong. According to integralism, government and society ought not reflect continued disagreement among different paths of life and values but agreement on the good. As Kevin Vallier puts it, integralists and their brethren in other religious faiths “often support an extensive state that adopts one of the great religions and shapes people to fit within that faith. Anti-liberals seek to alter or abolish liberal orders, and they oppose all liberal political and ethical theories.”

As this makes clear, although it has parallels in other faiths, integralism per se is originally a Catholic idea (and Vance is a Catholic convert). The far-right Integralist Party arose in 19^th Century Spain and, decades later, its remnants fought on Franco’s side during the civil war. According to Rebecca Bratten Weiss (herself a Catholic):

… integralism shares many of fascism’s basic characteristics, as outlined by Italian philosopher Umberto Eco: emphasis on tradition, rejection of modernism, fear of diversity, appeals to social frustration, a tendency toward nationalism, a cult of machismo and heteronormativity, and selective populism. This doesn’t mean that integralists are fascists. But throughout history the two have made common cause.

In Cross Purposes: Christianity's Broken Bargain with Democracy, Jonathan Rauch argues that the drafters of the US Constitution, especially James Madison, believed the Constitution could not work effectively unless the church was there to discipline the morality of the people in power. That is, there is an implied separation of responsibilities in society that is more fundamental than the separation of powers found within the Constitution itself.

We are all aware of that separation breaking down but usually think of it as the evangelical protestant churches going into politics. Rausch argues that an even more insidious trend has been politics going into the church. He reports many cases of pastors resigning as their congregations are taken over by a handful of political activists. His book is a plea to Americans to restore Madison’s duality.

Okieriete Onaodowan as James Madison in the musical Hamilton

Good or bad aside, Rauch is documenting the arrival of an inchoate integralism as a de facto part of American reality. This is a development with potentially profound consequences because the dualism goes back far beyond Madison.

In 1054 Christianity split in two, between what we now call Catholicism in the west and Orthodoxy in the east. In the west, this was quickly followed on 13 April 1059 by the issuing of the papal bull In nomine Domini. This was a declaration of independence: in future, the Pope would be elected by the church’s own cardinals, not appointed by the Holy Roman Emperor. Hence, today, the puffs of grey smoke.

To justify the gambit, the bull sketched out a novel claim – that the church should have exclusive responsibility for moral questions. In the telling of Larry Siedentop, the ramifications of this move have been profound. Over time, he argues in The Invention of the Individual, the Emperor and the rest of the feudality pushed back with a mirror image argument – they should be exclusively responsible for secular matters. This movement the church found itself unable to stop but long resisted. Only with the Second Vatican Council in 1965 (loathed by many conservative Catholics) did it acknowledge the reality of the division, including by endorsing the principle of freedom of worship.

This duality is how Protestantism managed to get going in the first place. It is, on Siedentop’s account, deep within us all. It is the origin of the duality that Rauch finds in Madison and, implicitly, in the foundations of the US Constitution. It is where the United States of America came from. It is, as per Madison and Rausch, what the USA is.

Integralism has the capacity to reverse all of this. It gives the church back the supremacy it lost centuries ago. If successful therefore, it is liable to turn the US from a dualistic to a monolithic state, like Russia or Iran.

It is hard to imagine a future that is less aligned with the everyday understanding of MAGA as a throwback to the 1950s. To the American WASPs of the 1950s, the American WASPs of the 2150s would be like aliens from another planet.

Goodbye Peggy Sue.

Kathleen Turner in Peggy Sue Got Married