Trump, the state and the revolution

To say that Trump in his new incarnation is different from the Trump No. 1 is to state the obvious. The world and the United States have been subjected to a deluge of decrees and decisions that have changed affairs internationally and domestically. It has been a three-week wild ride that does not seem to have run out of steam yet and has confirmed the idea that the new Trump will rule very differently from the old.

There are two reasons for this difference.

I will be very brief on the first reason which is less important and has to do with the personality of Trump. When he came to power in 2017 he clearly did not even expect to win the Republican nomination, much less to win the presidency. So he was not prepared and didn't know what to do. His ideology was a hotchpotch of things learned during his real estate and Miss Universe contest careers, and, never having worked within the broadly-defined government or having been elected, he had not even the slightest idea how to technically implement the vague things he believed in. Trump’s ideology might not have changed since but as an individual he has matured in eight years. In fact, nobody who would have been subjected to eight years of steady investigations, abuse by most media, endless court cases, being forced to seat in court-houses for days and with his (real and imagined) misdeeds exposed, being impeached twice, and coming close to being assassinated at least once could possibly come out of that experience an unchanged person. All attempts to put him back in his place or to get rid of him politically have failed. He must now think, as many in his position would, that he is a man of destiny. As such he must feel that he ought to leave some durable legacy.

The most important and momentous change compared to Trump No. 1 is that he now has Elon Musk and his merry band of convention-breakers who are proceeding to the dismantling of the state apparatus. What they are doing under the title of the Department Of Government Efficiency seems novel for the people who have not had the experience or even the knowledge of any revolutionary change. The last such revolutionary change in the United States was done by FDR in the 1930s; it included smashing the old state, creating a new one and endowing it with multitude of new functions, most of which have endured for decades. It is Marxism 101 that if you have a revolutionary movement that movement in order to survive has to smash the old state apparatus and create a new. Marx wrote of that with regard to the Paris Commune: “The next attempt of the French revolution [the Commune] will be no longer, as before, to transfer the bureaucratic-military machine from one hand to another, but to smash [emphasis by Marx] it” (Letter to Kugelman, April 12, 1871). Lenin later implemented it when he came to power. Without the control of the state apparatus every revolution is incomplete and in danger of being overthrown.

The current revolution comes with certain (so to speak) American characteristics. The American state has become an enormous machinery that is largely unrelated to whoever is in power. This has been noticed by the ideologues of the Trumpist revolution: the apparatus of the state continued functioning and producing the same outcomes regardless of who was in power. While this happens in many countries, it has been exacerbated in the US by the American specificity where large parts of the decision-making have been “outsourced” or taken away from both the executive and the legislative branches. The Treasury Department is run, whether it is under Democrats or Republicans by Wall Street (Paulson, Rubin, Mnuchin, Brady e tutti quanti), the Fed is legally independent, and America has been well-known in the 19^th century, and has returned to be, a “system of courts and parties” where the judiciary makes many of de facto political decisions that in the parliamentary systems are made by politicians. When one puts these things together one quickly realizes that the scope of the executive power is fairly limited, not only by what is conventionally considered as the limits imposed by Congress and the independent judiciary but by the fact that large segments of decision-making (monetary and fiscal policy or regulatory policy) are done by the “apparatchiks” who are independent of, and pay scant attention to, the party in power.

The ideologues of the Trumpist revolution (and here I have in mind especially N. S. Lyons who has produced several ideologically very clear texts, in particular The China Convergence and American Strong Gods) have noticed a further phenomenon that limits the scope of their revolution. The apparatus of the state has been over the years populated by the extreme liberals who obviously do not share the view of the world of the Trumpist revolutionaries. The state apparatus has thus additionally and ideologically become insulated from the Trumpist executive. The revolutionaries believe that the state apparatus has been filled by liberals because of liberals’ dominance in the intellectual sphere, through the control over the top American universities, the world of think tanks, and quasi governmental institutions. The liberal point of view has come to dominate all those who join the state apparatus or participate in parastate activities. (Obviously, people who populate the apparatus will select to help or replace them similarly opinionated people.) The ideologues ascribe the rise of a liberal Professional Managerial Class (PMC) to its dominance in the knowledge production. I do not find this a particularly persuasive explanation because it considers the locale of conflict to be in ideology, removed from “the infrastructure” or locale of social reproduction where more materialistic ideologies tend to see the key contradictions express themselves. In any case, the dominance in intellectual knowledge production gets translated, through personnel, into the control of the state apparatus.

If that diagnosis holds, then it is clear that revolutionaries have to take over and/or destroy the existing apparatus of the state. That means that the purge needs to go way beyond the usual changes when new presidents come to power which are limited to the top and affect only political appointees. If the state apparatus is to be taken over then the purge must be much more thorough and political appointees must be placed much more deeply, into even ordinary technical positions. Given that many government tools are anyway exempt from control by the executive, that the ideological “hegemony” of the Right would take decades (if ever) to become real, and faced with an inimical government apparatus, the Trumpist revolutionaries conclude that, even if they were to win one election after another, they could accomplish very little. The “foam” on the top would change, but not much else.

This I think provides a logical explanation for the revolutionaries’ zeal to make the change more durable. It is sometimes derisively claimed that the revolutionaries want to destroy the “deep state” and then to argue that such a deep state does not exist in America. This is a naive objection that takes the meaning of the deep state in the way it was originally defined in Pakistan and Turkey (military establishment uncontrolled by the government). This indeed does not, or certainly does not fully, exist in the US. Differently, the attempt to take over the state is ascribed to partisanship. This is a meaningless critique because partisanship is, by definition, shared by all the political persuasions and all political ideologies. Only those who live in an ethereal world of phantasies can claim that the domestic and international economic decisions are a pure matter of technical expertise. This is the argument used by the elites to claim that they have a special technical knowledge which makes them non-partisan and that therefore they should be left in peace to do whatever they have been doing. Both of these critiques of the revolutionaries’ action miss the point. The revolutionaries’ objective is to take control of the apparatus of the state which under the specific US conditions means the personnel purge (as it did mean during the Chinese Cultural Revolution or the post-Communist transitions in Eastern Europe). That objective has nothing to do with the existence or not of a Turkish-like “deep state” or political partisanship. It has to do with power. The battle that we see between Elon Musk and his supporters and different parts of the US state are the usual battles that we see when a revolutionary movement wants to leave a deeper imprint over the future.