In a few short months President Donald Trump and his administration have created history of an old geopolitical sort—history not merely done by the West to others, but happening to it. In the past decades we have seen the Eastern bloc, capitalism’s other, collapse into capitalism itself. We have watched China rise, a peasant society becoming a hypermodern one in two generations. We have seen spectacular events in the West, such as 9/11. And we have experienced the transformation of everyday life, social relations and selfhood created by new technologies—which, as we have often noted, have changed global structures of power, social relations and everyday life far more than more visible events have.
But we have not had the sort of fundamental re-ordering of the ‘top level’ of our world that has been commenced by the Trump administration. With a flurry of executive decisions, Trump has taken the United States to the very limit of, and beyond, the checks and balances that guarantee its status as a republic and an actually existing democracy. These initiatives will soon go to a Supreme Court which now has a ‘conservative’, originalist majority. It may well reward propositions of unbounded executive power that would have been rejected as constitutionally ludicrous a few years ago. This will release what was designed to be a strong executive restrained by enlightenment conscience to pursue a huge scope of action in an era of hyperpartisan sentiment and multiple narratives of reality.
That power has begun to be projected abroad in ways that upend the international liberal order through which the United States has projected global power. Though Trump’s manner is often comical, that gives cover to a return to a brutal realpolitik of solo American world dominance and direction. Gaza and the ethnic cleansing thereof—a proposal as brutal and dispossessing as inter-war European population transfers—is sold with an AI video featuring a gold statue of King Trump in the centre of a rebuilt ‘Riviera’ run and owned by the United States. We are in a period in which the moral-political debate about colonisation, and the processes by which our current world was made—explored extensively in our section on settler-colonialism, theory and strategy after the Voice referendum—have been thrown over for a gleeful trumpeting of the will.
Canada, New Zealand and Europe have been trashed as ‘parasites’. The decades-long project of building large alliances of client and minor-partner states, along with a wider expansion of soft power via the dominance of US mass culture (Wim Wenders: ‘the Americans have colonised the subconscious’), has been abandoned. Most spectacular of all has been the reversal on Ukraine, now defined as a grifter state and blackmailed for its mineral wealth. A country that was a centre-piece of the US strategy to extend its ‘exceptional’ character—that of Empire, omnipresent through the world—has become an example to anyone who might believe they could develop a special, or any, relationship to it.
Such a new geopolitics, driven from within by ‘revivalist’ and gnostic forms of ‘conservative’ politics that see liberalism as an elite betrayal of eternal verities, cannot but see past decades of soft power extension as the enemy. This is nothing like the various forms of isolationism that the United States has sometimes pursued. It is a form of global supremacy that ties its success to the absolute development of high technology through the fusion of techno-science and capital and its integration with the state and military. The supercharged development of AI and other technologies draws on the fanatical fervour with which the intellectual side of Silicon Valley pursues its goals. They claim as their motivation humanitarian goals grounded in life and love: the abolition of disease and poverty, the ‘survival of consciousness in the Universe’. AI—whatever that term describes—is both a continuity with all technology, and a breach. It is Sign, God particle, and Adversary.
How has this takeover occurred? As in similar events from the past, sufficient of the population have gone to the Right, because the Left and progressives have failed to offer what the people are really demanding. Across the West over past decades, centre-left and progressive elites have come to dominate political and institutional power structures, identifying themselves with the enforcement of discipline—whether of market or discourse—while allowing the Right to become the party of demand and insurgency. The radical Left argues that this is a sell-out of the left program by corrupt or cynical leaders. Rather, it is the inevitable consequence of a progressivism which has fused the globalised openness of the market and identified it with the implicit ethical stance of infinitely extended interconnection: that of boundary-crossing, universalism, equalisation, departicularisation. One effect of this hypermodern cultural process has been to undermine the basic human need for ground. Among the younger intellectually trained—i.e. students—this need thus reappeared as the demand for ‘safety’, not now based in known communities or trusted intermediate institutions, but attached to the atomised individual as a series of rights enforced by surveillance and prevention. Those outside of this smaller social grouping had other ideas about what might serve as a social guarantee: a bounded society.
Few progressive governments have been as badly caught in the establishment trap as the Albanese Labor government. Its elevation, soon after the Morrison’s government’s negotiation of the AUKUS treaty and before its fleshing-out, was an opportunity to repudiate it and to outline a more independent relationship to the United States and the region, within the bounds of political realism. Instead, regarding national security as merely a political problem to be neutralised, it made sure to outdo the Coalition in its commitment to the new alliance. This was despite the fact that one key aspect of AUKUS—forces interoperability, or the meshing of Australian command systems with the US system—should have been the occasion for a once-in-a-half-century debate about what our national security foreign policy might be. But these new technological conditions were taken as the opposite: as a level of high-tech development which mandated that we had no choice but to accept them. This is the expression of a wider attitude to tech, in the workplace, in education, in medicine: that it must be accepted without question, in pursuit of ends—fantasies of growth-fuelled abundance—which are themselves a promise of security and ultimate ground.
To say that Labor should open debate about how we should live, and how we should collectively face such comprehensive transformation, is to risk being accused of woolly-headedness. Yet the only way it will reconnect to its socially emancipatory traditions is to widen the social question to include these new challenges. This is the very last thing it will do, however, as it pursues the role of being the party of intellect fused with capital, catalysed by the state. Whatever Trump’s triumphs in these first months, his rolling thunder administration will face challenges arising from the contradictions within its own movement soon enough. Pundits have already identified the two wings of the movement as ‘DOGE’ and ‘MAGA’. The latter are those who got Trump elected, in 2016 and again this time. They want not the infinite extension of US power through technology, but the restoration of its last period of boundedness and continence—the racially homogenous, labour-intensive industrial full employment of the 1950s into the 1970s, which is increasingly an intergenerational folk memory. They cannot have it of course, and the obsessive reshaping of the United States by DOGE—i.e. Trump’s techno-Prometheans—will take them further from it.
The changed world that has put that past out of reach offers back fantasies of it via myths and images. Their unreality drives a demand for ever-more-concentrated and concrete evocations of that past, increasingly reliant on conspiracy theories to explain its persistent absence. Same as it ever was, but fascism, the first time round, occurred in mass society grounded in crowd power. MAGA’s base in the United States, Reform’s in the United Kingdom, is the atomised world of the post-spatial and post-public. It occurs within the nexus of ever-more-autonomous fragmented and violent social action met by ever-greater state repression that it claims to be the solution to. Both factions of the Trump movement take for granted that the United States itself is protected from the process of subversion that its current leadership is projecting out into the world. Given its status as the world’s most consciously ‘self-constituted’ nation, such a bet is very courageous indeed.
So if the world suddenly appears to be ‘crazy’—the default term used by clueless press galleries and mainstream political commentators—it is because its most visible elements are being re- or de-constituted at its deepest level, with effects both global and local. The casual breaking of nations has suddenly become plausible at the same time as, for example, the university is being fully dematerialised. One could cite any number of current transformations in addition. The process cannot be indefinite, because the undermining of the basic conditions of social life—anchored by face-to-face community, abiding over time and guaranteeing reciprocity and trust—cannot be wholly compensated for by regimes of technology, surveillance and control, which gain their content from the mythologisation of national destiny and triumph. The hard power Trump and others wield, as soft power recedes, will undermine itself soon enough; when it does, those most subject to it will be blamed for its failure, and a new round of repression will commence. Through our efforts, wherever we are, to resist and reverse the dissolution of the genuinely social—to pursue the unglamorous work of building and rebuilding—we commit to a collective life worth living and prepare the ground for the battles that are soon to come.