Authoritarianism Goes Hand-in-hand with Late-stage Capitalism
“Something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots.” -Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country, 1998
“One direction involves workers struggling collectively and pulling millions of impoverished people behind them. The other involves demagogues exploiting the sense of hopelessness, demoralisation, and fragmentation to direct the bitterness of one section of the impoverished mass against other sections.” -Chris Harman, Zombie Capitalism, 2009
“I believe history will look back on four years of this president and all he embraces as an aberrant moment in time.” -Joe Biden, 2019
Back in 2021, after Biden was elected, our local people in Mid-Missouri seemed to prefer not to consider that Trump could become president again. Where, prior to the 2020 election, we’d hosted twice-weekly campfire meetings for friends worried their neighbors’ safety, by mid-November 2020, both community meetings and inquiries about firearms training had already dried up. Inquiries about joining the club also came to an end, and soon after, many of our own vetted members chose – for a variety of valid personal reasons – to leave the club, simply because the sense of urgency was no longer there. While I continued to try to read vigorously, to write for this blog, and to perform quiet service work, by 2023 I too found it all too easy to reclaim the arts & sciences life I’d enjoyed for decades prior to 2016.
But the steadfast march of authoritarianism under capitalism, with or without Trump, is something that does not go away. I often think of capitalism’s devolution right now like a steamroller going down a long hill; a few well-placed straw bales, like four years under Biden or another four years under Harris, might slow it down, but the steamroller can’t be stopped, not until its own internal forces have played themselves out. As Harman said in the quote above, the way it plays out can be via a people’s revolution, or via authoritarianism. The aftermath of January 6th should have been our clue, because unlike 1970s America after Watergate and Vietnam, the nation as a whole never came together to repudiate January 6th; as several comrades said at the time, this gets worse before it gets better.
And none of us should ever think that the Democratic party and their allied pundits, as they try to understand what went wrong in 2024, are ever going to understand that authoritarianism is, right now, the inevitable & necessary fellow traveler of capitalism. I looked up responses to Biden’s 2019 statement above about Trumpism being aberrant, and here are some things I found:
Jeffrey C. Isaac, a professor of political science at Indiana University, Bloomington, frames Trumpism as having a good ol’ American basis in the Bill of Rights. Even while the seeds of good things like abolition and emancipation were ensconced there, so were the seeds of the KKK and the racist beliefs of people like Jefferson Davis, because these things too go along with being “independent.” Someone like Trump fits right in with this entirely American phenomenon of “elemental forces,” as another historian, Jon Meachem, has characterized them, or the “ugly American” stereotype.
Another professor, Dan P. McAdams at Northwestern University, frames Trump as having a Christ-like appeal. “In the minds of millions,” he says, “Trump is more than a person.” Characterizing himself as a “golden god” in his own mind, Trump is, in keeping with former authoritarians like Mussolini, a “liminal” figure, a “personified entity around which mythologies are made — much more than a person could ever be, and much less.”
There’s also the Republican-party-in-descent angle. Mehdi Hasan, a columnist and host at The Intercept and Al Jazeera English’s UpFront, characterizes Trump as the logical consequence of a Republican party that has fanned obstructionist flames since at least the 1990s; as others have similarly argued about Gingrich’s movement from that time, through the Tea Party movement, to the present, “Trump is a symptom of longstanding Republican nihilism and derangement — not the cause of it.”
All of these perspectives have some truth – Trump does embody an elemental and obstinate American sensibility of “independence” dating to the time of our foundation; he has come to embody (for many) somebody set apart from mere humans; and he is the logical outcome of a Republican party that has, finally, given into its latent longing for rightist bigotry. But none of these analyses seem to consider why Trump’s very American, liminal, and extremist-Republican views have traction, and why they have traction now. In other words, even the experts still don’t get it.
Well… maybe one expert gets it. Shortly after the 2024 election, Bernie Sanders had this to say about the Democrats:
“It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them…. Will the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign? Will they understand the pain and political alienation that tens of millions of Americans are experiencing? Do they have any ideas as to how we can take on the increasingly powerful Oligarchy, which has so much economic power?”
I remember volunteering for the Democrats in 2004 (simply because at the time I didn’t know what else to do). One day a rep from the local construction union walked in to confirm that the local was behind the party, and asked what the union could do to help; and I recall thinking: what is he doing here? With the snap-button flannel shirt, trucker ballcap, and tool belt he was a world away from the room of turned-out white ladies and retired university gentlemen at the volunteer headquarters. It was hard to believe that the Democrats, which by 2004 had become the party of NPR and Garrison Keillor, had ever appealed to working people like him. But I looked it up just now and to my surprise, the Democrats continued to have union support even in 2024; the bigger problem seems to be the Democrats’ inability to connect with working class people outside of the unions and their insistence on courting the same big-moneyed class that embraces Republicans. “Organized labor has many enemies in this country. Unfortunately, we also need to start worrying about our friends,” said one local president about the Democrats; “Should we start our own party and run for office ourselves?”
It is this wholehearted inability of the Democrats and the liberals to understand the plight of the working class that led that class directly into the hands of authoritarians, and in so doing, has politically enhanced the hands of billionaires, who are now 46 percent, or $1.3 trillion richer in 2024 than they were in 2020, and who now face lower tax rates and unfettered campaign finance restrictions.
And it is here, where, even as anarchists or leftist-adjacent progressives, we have to take to heart the validity of Marxian analyses. In the words of historian Robert S. Duplessis, capitalists’ profits consist of the difference between the costs of their capital inputs and the price their output receives in markets… “to gain or preserve advantage in those markets, capitalists are under continuous pressure to innovate to cut production costs.” Lowered taxes, overseas markets, lowered overseas production costs, and transfers of wealth via debt (as happened in 2008) all help to increase capital, but at some point even those options will have exhausted themselves, and capitalism will have only its own corpse to feed on. The phrase “end-stage capitalism” is thrown around quite a bit these days, but I believe that this is what it means. Rumors of capitalism’s end, like Mark Twain’s death, have been greatly exaggerated, because somehow it always magically manages (kind of like Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” in the markets) to find a workaround – to find new ways of accumulating capital, to create that special “surplus value” craved by the business owners.
But as pathways become narrowed, capitalism will start to exhaust its options. I believe that now, it is possible, that advantages from overseas production (not the overseas resources themselves, but the cost-cutting advantages from production done cheaply overseas) are playing themselves out, even as these receding global advantages continue to squeeze American wages. As climate change impacts millions – whether via forced migration, death, or crop failure – capitalism is panicking as it nears the end of its ability to eke out a surplus. People here in the US know something is wrong, but other than those directly affected by famine or warfare (who are mostly overseas, for the time being) they can’t necessarily point to exactly what it is; we in the US continue to be horrified but also perplexed by mass shootings and the deaths of despair of loved ones. In the words of Bob Dylan, we know something is happening, but we don’t know what it is, probably because it’s too big and because we are right inside of it.
Does capitalism really contain, as Marx asserted, the seeds of its own destruction? We can only hope. The first reign of Trump reminded some of the reign of Nero, but let’s not forget that while Nero died in in AD 68, the Roman empire plodded on until AD 476 – another 399 years. In the meantime, it is realist, not cynicist, to own that we are now in the times of hopelessness, demoralization, and fragmentation that Chris Harman predicted at the top of this article. If we can see things for what they are, we can stop giving money to distant elected officials and can then proceed to build our own systems – of dual power, mutual aid, and direct action – in short, to build community – to mitigate many of the negative effects. It might mean training and learning skills like first aid and other things to help defend marginalized peoples under threat; it might mean working to help internally-displaced domestic refugees (our homeless); it might mean calling neighborhood meetings to create power, instead of defaulting to the inherently subservient notion of “speaking truth to power” that gives our initiative away to distant representatives. Whatever it may mean – and many of us will have to figure it out as we go – it’s time to make the connections to help it happen. Do it now; and if it seems hard, there are people out there who can help. Indeed, the time to start was four years ago.