Trump 2.0: what might it mean?

And how to be a good conspiracy theorist in the post-neoliberal age

There’s an article in Time magazine asking “how far Trump would go” if re-elected, based on a face-to-face interview. I was alerted to it by Anthony Scaramucci and Katty Kay in their new podcast series The Rest is Politics US, Episode 2 of which tells us all we need to know about excessive private political donations.

To choose just one idea floated by Trump in the Time article: “He would be willing to fire a U.S. Attorney who doesn’t carry out his order to prosecute someone, breaking with a tradition of independent law enforcement that dates from America’s founding.” This is about more than Trump getting revenge for his present legal problems. In his previous term, he aimed to increase political civil-service appointments (which presently number about 4,000) so he could fire federal employees who didn’t carry out his wishes.

In the nineteenth century, before they caught up with the idea of a merit-based civil service, there was “the spoils system” in which political loyalists were rewarded with jobs. “To the victor, the spoils.” Many Americans saw this as “democratic”. Given that voters had granted the president executive power, and the Constitution says nothing about “permanent” federal employees, the president could choose people who’d do what they were told. Nowadays, however, as civil servants are hired on the grounds of independently established expertise, Trump’s rhetoric against “the deep state” is often seen as a sign of his authoritarianism. But America has a long tradition of resistance to “unelected” people making decisions. Trump revives the original populism of President Andrew Jackson (in office 1829–37) whom Jefferson had described as “unfit” for the office.

What drives Trump’s politics is not really ideology or heritage, however: the critical factor is loyalty to Trump, which gets reciprocated. Those convicted of charges from the Jan 6 storming of the Capitol are likely to be pardoned by Trump en masse, if he gets back into office. His politics are transactional rather than values-based. “Trumpism” is a consequence of a culture of individualism. His “base” looks somewhat like a Roman clientela. He views the world in personalised terms; he’s neither an idealist nor a realist.

Trump’s casual relationship with the rule of law and his plan to re-impose trade tariffs, especially on China, breach neoliberal orthodoxy. Neoliberals won’t lament his attack on the administrative state and his tax-cuts, on the other hand.

RCP poll averages are showing Trump ahead in the popular vote and in battleground states. But don’t take that as a prediction!

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Was neoliberalism just a “meta-deception”?

George Monbiot, writing for the Guardian, has interviewed a guy who’s deep down the rabbit-hole. He finds him to be a decent caring person, were it not for the anti-Semitic fantasies.

Monbiot rightly points out that real conspiracies do sometimes happen, as revealed by the Panama and Pandora papers and by the scandal over Cambridge Analytica in 2016, for example. Watergate is often cited too. Malign activities that were concealed have been exposed. So a “good” conspiracy theory is one that’s based on evidence and could be falsified by counter-evidence.

The people we normally call conspiracy theorists are better described as “conspiracy fantasists”, Monbiot proposes, as they’re impervious to adverse evidence and counter-argument. They imagine, with scant evidence, a shadowy cabal or hidden hand at work behind historical events, operating with malign intentions to defraud or control the people. Any lack of evidence becomes evidence of “cover-ups”, but these secondary narratives get so elaborate, and would have to involve so many people, that they lack credibility. And, as Monbiot observes, “conspiracy fantasists” are oddly uninterested in verified conspiracies, preferring stories that are highly implausible and easily debunked.

Being Monbiot, though, he blames contemporary conspiracy fantasies on that “meta-deception” known as neoliberalism. “The spread and development of this ideology was quietly funded by some of the richest people on Earth.” Note that word “quietly”. Couldn’t they have made more noise about it?

Neoliberalism is a historically known tradition of ideas and policies, but can we class it as a conspiracy?

There’s a robust historical narrative that traces neoliberal economic theory back to Austria in the 1920s, following the defeat and break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The erection of border-controls between the new nation-states created trade barriers where they hadn’t previously existed. Neoliberalism then gains momentum against the background of totalitarianism – fascist and communist – in the 1930s. These systems suborned economic activity to the purposes of the state.

Neoliberalism acquires its name by 1938. It was “new” back then because it called for a strong but minimal state to enforce the rule of law, unlike the “old” classical liberalism of the industrial revolution. After WW2, neoliberalism resists the rise of the welfare state and high tax-rates in capitalist economies. It comes into its own in the Thatcher–Reagan years of the 1980s, assisted by Friedrich Hayek (from Vienna) and Milton Friedman (from Chicago), and many of its precepts are now institutionalised in public policy. As the Chileans recently discovered, neoliberal policy principles can be hard to remove once they’re baked in.

The intellectuals and politicians behind this movement are known. I’ve given a fuller account in chapter 9 of my book How to Rule?

Neoliberal policies resulted in the redistribution of income and wealth upwards into the hands of the wealthiest. This can be seen in inequality statistics. And many neoliberal principles now look to many people like common sense, and not like a political ideology, largely because they’ve grown up with them and/or they serve their interests.

The trouble for Monbiot is that, if we accept his idea that neoliberalism is a historical political conspiracy, then he has to deal with the idea that there’s also a “socialist conspiracy”. Well, there was a Cold War scaremongering fantasy about “reds under the bed”. But there were actually some Soviet spies too, and many socialists really did want to internationalise the revolution. The domino theory wasn’t completely nuts.

A quick Google search also revealed a book with the title One Nation Under Attack: How the Socialist Conspiracy is Paying Washington to Destroy Our Nation. I don’t think I’ll buy that one. The blurb mentions the Antichrist.

But was neoliberalism a conspiracy? Conspirators, by definition, generally conceal what they’re doing. The neoliberals of the twentieth century were eager to publish their ideas and to persuade people. If they were hiding what they were up to, then it was hidden in plain sight, or temporarily suppressed by Nazism. You don’t need an investigative journalist to “blow their cover” because the neoliberals weren’t under cover. They held conferences and published speeches. Anyone can read their books. But most people don’t read them because they’re boring. If you want something sleep-inducing, try Hayek’s Constitution of Liberty (first published in 1960 by the University of Chicago Press and republished by Routledge).

The French philosopher Michel Foucault gave some equally boring, but mercifully brief, lectures on neoliberalism in 1979, having plenty of published material to go on. He wasn’t uncovering a conspiracy or a secret history.

The neoliberals believed what they said and didn’t try to deceive. Anyone could see that they had wealthy backers. Their doctrine may not convince everyone, but it was always visible in print. If people feel they’ve been deceived by neoliberalism, then they can read all about it, and then they’ll no longer be deceived, even if they still don’t like it. The levels of poverty and inequality today are morally indefensible and economically counter-productive, after all, and there’s been a measurable decline in the share of national income that goes to workers’ wages. In the US “net productivity grew 59.7% from 1979-2019 while a typical worker’s compensation grew by 15.8%”, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

Of course there are false theories and stories out there, including those that Monbiot aptly calls conspiracy fantasies. Some people sincerely believe them all the same, and some don’t believe them but spread them anyway just to bamboozle others. Any set of ideas can be misused that way, including socialism and neoliberalism. They both get distorted – for example, those rants on X about “cultural Marxism”, and that one about a cabal of super-wealthy global conspirators (often thought to be Jewish) sitting in a control room somewhere. One way to discredit something that we don’t understand is to depict it as malign and organised – an approach popularised by Archie Bunker (of All in the Family fame) and, ironically, by Noam Chomsky, George Monbiot and others. Explaining complex events in terms of a conspiracy gives the appearance of special insight and it saves the trouble of fully accounting for scientific and historical knowledge. In the academic world, it’s often done under the guise of “critical thinking”.

We’re all down a rabbit-hole of one kind or another. But no one really likes to admit it. A “good” conspiracy theory, however, is one that knows it’s only a theory and is open to being falsified or modified by evidence.