Donald Trump and the Limits of Liberal Criticism

One silver lining of Trump’s return is that it has undermined the central claim of a now ubiquitous school of thought professing that the fundamental problem with US politics is the conservatism, or countermajoritarianism, of the Constitution. Writers including Levitsky and Ziblatt, Ari Berman, Erwin Chemerinksy, and others have been reintroducing the claim that the Constitution’s countermajoritarian institutions, namely the Electoral College, the Senate, the filibuster, and the Supreme Court, are the source of our political problems, and that if we only had more democratic institutions we would have a more representative and thereby effective government. To be sure, the US slavocracy and a visceral fear of “too much liberty,” particularly following Shays’ Rebellion and other popular revolts, are present in much of the Constitution and are part of the reason why the Dakotas have as many senators as California and New York and why five unelected Supreme Court justices can overturn the desires of hundreds of millions with a flick of their billionaire-gifted pens. Nevertheless, one need only look at the success of the AfD in Germany to dispel the myth that more democratic proceduralism necessarily leads to more progressive outcomes.

The new constitutional reformers are particularly concerned that the US’s antidemocratic institutions, most prominently the Electoral College, have been dangerously impeding what they hold to be the natural evolution of US politics: “multiracial democracy.” Anticipating a looming demographic disaster, the country’s white soon-to-be minority has, the argument goes, doubled down on its embrace of the Constitution’s protections of minority rights. The Electoral College is the last hill to die on for the dwindling white masses, since we can be quite sure that, outside of cheating, no Republican will ever win the majority again. In fact, the emergence of this multiracial democracy is so threatening that some scholars warn that it will bring the US into another civil war! All the signs (except for the actual fissures within the ruling class that would produce such a war) are there, scholars ominously warn in their Ted Talks.

Alas, those who believed that people of color were destined to vote for the Democratic Party in perpetuity fell flat on their faces, as Trump performed better with every demographic except for whites and won the majority. Not missing a beat, journalists such as Nikole Hannah-Jones, founder of the 1619 Project, have responded that Latinos (Mexican-Americans, Cuban-Americans, Puerto Ricans, et al.) for Trump are willing to sacrifice their “true interests” (as omnisciently understood by Hannah-Jones) because they so badly long to associate themselves with white supremacy (it’s not quite clear why this vicarious white supremacy has dramatically increased between 2020 and 2024). In other words, actually existing “multiracial Democracy” is quite different from the liberal hope of “multiracial Democracy,” which was always in fact a stand-in for the permanent reign of the Democratic Party. This same liberal identitarian ideology runs through much of the 1619 Project — and its ahistorical, teleological, and liberal reformist account of US history — itself. For those interested in world-class historical criticism, I encourage you to read the World Socialist Web Site’s outstanding interview series on the 1619 Project, as historians including Gordon Wood, Victoria Bynum, James Oakes, and James McPherson rip Hannah-Jones’ historical malpractice to shreds.

That notwithstanding, there isn’t much wisdom to be found online, or else it is too deeply buried under endless output from too clever by half social media stars whose raison d’etre is book promotion and substack subscription recruitment via paid-by-the-word solipsistic filler and “I said it first” circle jerks. And insight is certainly not found among our liberal intelligentsia, as it doesn’t matter how finely polished the analyses of Ezra Klein or Sean Wilentz are; because they don’t have a revolutionary bone in their bodies, such thinkers fail to identify the horror, and thereby the reality, of actually existing conditions. Having watched Trump break the back of the Democratic Party, some rightly sense that liberalism is an exhausted ideology; they fail, however, to recognize that it was necessarily first an exhausted economic system.

But we can always return to Marx, who would disabuse us of the notion that the problem with the Constitution is that it does not fulfill its liberatory and egalitarian potential – that it is not democratic enough. Liberty under capitalism, as they say, is freedom to starve, while equality under the law means in practice only that rich and poor alike are prohibited from sleeping under bridges. It makes little sense to pursue the ideals of the very class that, in every other arena, makes our lives miserable.

Marx would have also highlighted the growing disconnect between not “democracy” but the demands of contemporary global capitalism and the state’s increasingly ossified political institutions. Observers including Paul Kennedy, Immanuel Wallerstein, Neil Smith, Alfred McCoy, and Richard Wolff have long been noting that the US is experiencing inevitable economic and geopolitical decline along with the collapse of its postwar postcolonial empire. The only question, as Kennedy put it in his 1987 book, was how the US would handle the return to international equilibrium: would it relatively gracefully acquiesce to a newly multipolar world or would it stupidly and violently resist? The US, via a series of spectacular bipartisan military and geopolitical failures, has pursued the latter course and has quite predictably accelerated what was being fended off.

Meanwhile, Biden’s attempt at a renewed Keynesianism, featuring large infrastructural and environmental projects, was always predicated on and circumscribed by the demands of the market: New Deal 2.0 it was not. While he’s spending his lame duck period launching missiles into the biggest country in the world, consumers are not only getting fleeced by shrinkflation but are getting dinged with fees every time they use their credit cards, are performing unending unpaid labor downloading and using “time-saving” apps so that companies could cut labor costs, are being subjected to the strategic sadism of the airline industry, are spending increasing hours stuck in traffic and dealing with back and hip pain, and are now paying for a variety of things — no more doctor’s office parking validations, suckers — that used to be on the house. If Keynesianism died in the 1970s, the 2020s revealed its corpse.

Trump’s return to power represents a new era of American decline. As Wolff argues, Trump’s twin economic policies are incoherent and reek of almost delusional denial: the self-defeating and inflationary policies of monstrous mass deportation and tariffs. If the business community, heterogeneous though it is, cannot stop the ideologues in the Trump Administration from pursuing this “America First” course, the effects will very likely lead to economic crisis and draconian austerity. The problem is that, albeit from another route, the business community is pining for austerity as well, and they have just the man to impose it. One way or the other, those immigrant detention camps, it is safe to bet, will outlive their original purpose.

This turning of the screw brings to mind an observation one writer made about the Cold War years. Dwight Eisenhower appeared in two presidential portraits, one smiling amiably and protectively at the domestic population and the other frowning menacingly at rivals overseas. Trump has reversed this relationship, smiling to rivals abroad while snarling at a domestic population that contains, as the incoming president puts it, “vermin,” “rapists,” and “enemies.” He promises global retrenchment – masquerading as isolationism – while unleashing forces that will further oppress those living in the belly of a shrinking beast.

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