An antisystemic movement differs radically from a reformist movement because whereas the latter aims at simply changing the existing institutions (“deepening democracy”, or “better regulating the market economy”, etc., etc.) the former aims at the complete replacement of the main socio-economic institutions and corresponding values with new institutions and values.
The U.S. is facing antisystemic times.
10 February 2025 — Here is the central problem: large numbers of Americans came to believe that their body politic was severely diseased. In Trump, they have found a man ruthless enough to inflict the remedy. Trump has spent nearly a decade discombobulating all the people who are paid big money to think about politics.
They failed. His appeal was consistently underestimated. It has also been, just as consistently, overcomplicated.
And now … a blizzard of executive orders from the new Trump administration which resembles not so much a handover of power as a surprisingly bloodless form of regime change, in which the props of America’s “liberal order” are dismantled one by one.
The substance of his style is so very, very simple: a gleeful hostility toward the institutions that have traditionally organized American life. He positions himself not merely as an outsider but as a destroyer: someone who delights in the demolition of norms and normalcy. “This is not normal!!” was the protest slogan from his first term, and used by the Democrats and “The Resistance” (whomever they were) in the 2024 election.
But for Trump and his admirers … that’s exactly the point.
As the political and technology writer Ben Tarnoff noted last month in a symposium about the re-election of Donald Trump:
His disorderliness is part of what makes him so entertaining. He is the consummate heel, a performer who owes much to the beloved antiheroes of professional wrestling. But beneath the buffoonery is something deathly serious. Large numbers of Americans have come to believe that their body politic is severely diseased. In Trump, they have found a man ruthless enough to inflict the remedy.
Democrats have long understood this aspect of Trumpism. Their response has been to rally to the defense of institutions. The modern Democratic Party is, above all, the guardian of norms and normalcy. This does not mean it is entirely incapable of creativity: the Biden administration’s domestic progressivism easily exceeded that of any presidency since Lyndon Johnson’s. But this agenda was embedded within a restorationist project. The aspiration of Bidenomics was to legitimize American governance. Some things would be changed for others to remain the same.
There are material factors at work here. The Democratic base is increasingly populated by affluent professionals, and they tend to be institutionalists. For them, the basic pillars of their country’s political economy are worth protecting. Yet the coalition also includes many working-class voters who are less sanguine about the status quo, and whose allegiance must be secured through progressive reforms. Thus the political complexion of the party at present: meliorist, even at times ambitiously so, but never antisystemic.
The inconvenience is that we live in antisystemic times. Trump intuited this, and now he has used it to install himself in the White House twice.
Granted. Each election is different, of course, and exit polls show that anger over inflation was the single biggest factor in Trump’s recent victory. But what animated this anger was not just the struggle to afford groceries and other necessities, but the spectacle of Democratic politicians and affiliated experts telling people that, contrary to the evidence of their own experience, the economy was in excellent health.
And that is precisely the sort of dissonance that breeds the legitimacy crisis on which Trumpism thrives. Yes, as it turns out Gaza may have been a less decisive campaign issue, but it offers a more extreme example of the same dynamic. The Biden administration was fond of talking about something called the “rules-based international order,” even as it provisions Israel with whatever it needs to genocidally slaughter the Palestinian people. One of Trump’s favorite themes is the mendacity and moral depravity of the ruling class. In the killing fields of Gaza, one could hardly find clearer proof.
We know from last week alone that Trump will not improve the lives of Palestinians – nor those of most Americans.
But neither will he wholly transfigure the structures of government. Yes, he is decimating the U.S. State Department, will decimate the U.S. Departments of Justice and the Education, and upend the Office of Personnel Management, etc., etc., etc.
BUT… in practice, it is selective anti-institutionalism. Sure, he may devote his term to dismantling the administrative state. But antidemocratic institutions like the Electoral College, the Senate, and the Supreme Court have served him and his allies quite well so they shall not be touched.
So for those who oppose him, the task of the next 4 years – hell, the next several decades – will be to think in terms not of restoration but of transformation. Trumpism cannot be defeated through moral appeals, a return to normal, or any combination of policies and messaging. “The Resistance” will kill itself by playing that tune.
Going back to Ben Tarnoff (that’s my emphasis in red):
This is a civilizational phenomenon, one that draws its energy from an atmosphere of civilizational emergency, in much the same way that classical fascism, its closest historical analogue, did in the previous century. An empire in decline is a dangerous animal.
To meet the exigencies of the era requires envisioning and enacting a different kind of country, with a different kind of relationship to the rest of the world. There are precedents to consult – Reconstruction, the Popular Front, and the civil rights movement come to mind – but the making of a free society is first and chiefly an act of imagination, a matter of discovering what new shapes might be made from the materials at hand, and then being foolish enough to place one’s faith in them.
And I want to pick up on Tarnoff’s thoughts on “an empire in decline” because it conjoins with a long essay I am writing, and is very apropos with the Munich Security Conference which I will be attending later this week. There is much to unpack on such an issue so just some brief points.
One does not have to look far to discern a revolutionary atmosphere in the current West. The blizzard of executive orders from Trump 2.0 masks the real story going on. With the new regime disestablishing USAID, and highlighting its artificial boosting of progressive doctrine across the world, paid for by the American taxpayer, we see Washington taking apart the workings of its own empire and holding them up to the world’s contempt.
The U.S. is blowing up its own order and replacing it with another – yet one only slowly revealing itself.
And the blizzard of announcements is very purposeful. The signifiers of total ideological rupture now come so quickly, piling one on top of the other, that it is hard to keep track: like the administrators of America’s deposed regime, we feel disorientated by the pace of change.
I watched last week’s interview with America’s Secretary of State, Mark Rubio (which was on Fox, naturally), in which he remarked “it’s not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power. That was an anomaly”.
BANG!! 💥 The stage is set. An historic turning point – almost lost in the sheer profusion of dramatic events. As Rubio stated, in a rejection of the Biden doctrine of the United States as the indispensable power, the guarantor of global democracy, America’s hegemonic era “was a product of the end of the Cold War, but eventually you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multipolar world, multi-great powers in different parts of the planet. We fight for our own interests, our own agenda”.
Rather than posing as their moral and strategic opposite, America is becoming more like China and Russia — a regional great power whose statecraft is increasingly amoral and purely self-interested, where things are up for negotiation. As author and Atlantic magazine writer David Frum put it:
Critics of the moral cant with which post-Cold War America masked its quest for global domination will soon experience Washington’s successor ideology as threatening in a different way. Where the Biden administration failed to live up to its own self-proclaimed morality in Gaza — the war there was as much an American venture as an Israeli one — Trump’s scheme to depopulate and annex Gaza as a glitzy beachfront Outremer pays no heed to human rights, as historically understood, at all. That world is finished.
So even for those of us immersed in the realpolitik of international life, it was a kick in the butt – a proposal so outside the moral framework of the world we have known that it may as well come from some alien intelligence. Threatening Denmark over Greenland, and Canada with annexation, the new America is a revisionist power turning its strength on the client states it formerly flattered with the fiction they were allies. It is not enough for Trump to exert pressure on leaders like Trudeau: they must be humiliated too, as symbols of a repudiated order.
The neoliberal order birthed by America’s unipolar moment is now firmly dead – but we still inhabit a political “interregnum”, in Gramsci’s terms, where its successor order, whatever that may be, has yet to reveal itself: “a transitional situation without a foreseeable end and with an open exit”.
But now – everything has become a transaction for America and its Trump bandits.
And this week it will be front-and-center as U.S. Vice President JD Vance sweeps into Europe. He attends the two-day AI Summit in Paris that begins today, then hops over to the Munich Security Conference which starts on Thursday.
He has already said Washington could stop supporting NATO, reducing its commitment, if allies “censor” American platforms. In an interview with the far-right American media outlet Breitbart, just before his departure this weekend, he said the defense of free speech is part of Trump’s “moral leadership in the world”. He added: “Unfortunately, a lot of our European friends have gone totally in the wrong direction here”.
And his staff say that Vance will deliver that exact message in his keynote address – set to come up hard against the EU’s far-reaching digital rulebook, including the Digital Services Act, which covers online content, and the AI Act, the world’s first binding rules for AI. As I have noted, the EU Commission is flummoxed on how to respond.
No worries. Individual EU states do not seem to care. As Vance arrives in Europe, a German court has ordered Elon Musk’s X platform to hand over politically relevant data ahead of a national election on February 23rd, while the Paris prosecutor’s office opened an investigation into allegations of algorithmic bias on X.
But one EU official I spoke with who is part of the EU prep team for the Munich conference:
“Vance is not coming there to listen. He will be aggressive. He will say our digital rules suck and that they are discriminating against U.S. tech companies. I do not think the EU’s digital rulebook has a chance”.
Pity the speechwriter for European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. She will be hard-pressed to walk this tightrope in her remarks in Paris and Munich, navigating between techno-optimism and the tricky subject of how the EU intends to uphold its own rules.
Oh, I know, I know. The victory of Trump’s new American successor state is itself not guaranteed; it may yet itself collapse into chaos, as many revolutions do. It is futile to predict the outcome of any of this. We are still trapped in the interregnum, we exist in a state of political unreality, torn between an America that no longer exists, and embarking down a new road, as yet untravelled, whose final destination is unknowable.
But the world will reshape – and I suspect for many it will be an unrecognizable form. America’s political and social life – oh, the entire world’s political and social life – over the next 4 years (or more) looks to be an endless, troubling dream from which we may be unable to wake.
From “The Prison Notebooks”, a series of essays written by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci was imprisoned by the Italian Fascist regime in 1926. The notebooks were written between 1929 and 1935.