Chartbook 380 Trump's futurism: Elon's rockets and fewer dolls for "baby girl" - Part I.

One common theme on the left is the idea of the exhaustion of the future. Mark Fisher articulated the idea forcefully in his writing about the “cancellation of the future”. More recently, the political theorist Jonathan White has warned of the exhaustion of the future as a resource of democratic politics.

Last month, in a piece in the Guardian Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor took up the theme. They characterize Trump’s politics as “end times fascism”, a politics which rather than constructively seeking to form a liveable world, wagers against the future and instead “banks on the bunker”, either in the form of personal survival (an option for the billionaire elite), planetary exit strategies, or fortress nationalisms.

In an extraordinary twist, Klein and Taylor compare the current far-right unfavorably to 20th-century fascism.

Reflecting on his childhood under Mussolini, the novelist and philosopher Umberto Eco observed in a celebrated essay that fascism typically has an “Armageddon complex” – a fixation on vanquishing enemies in a grand final battle. But European fascism of the 1930s and 1940s also had a horizon: a vision for a future golden age after the bloodbath that, for its in-group, would be peaceful, pastoral and purified. Not today.

Alive to our era of genuine existential danger – from climate breakdown to nuclear war to sky-rocketing inequality and unregulated AI – but financially and ideologically committed to deepening those threats, contemporary far-right movements lack any credible vision for a hopeful future. The average voter is offered only remixes of a bygone past, alongside the sadistic pleasures of dominance over an ever-expanding assemblage of dehumanized others.

Meanwhile, the elite, Klein and Taylor argue, are choosing exit:

Inspired by a warped reading of the political philosopher Albert Hirschman, figures including Goff, Thiel and the investor and writer Balaji Srinivasan have been championing what they call “exit” – the principle that those with means have the right to walk away from the obligations of citizenship, especially taxes and burdensome regulation. Retooling and rebranding the old ambitions and privileges of empires, they dream of splintering governments and carving up the world into hyper-capitalist, democracy-free havens under the sole control of the supremely wealthy, protected by private mercenaries, serviced by AI robots and financed by cryptocurrencies.

Klein and Taylor thus take the “fascism” question in a new direction. End times fascism, if we follow Klein and Taylor, is even bleaker than the original. It manages to be both as apocalyptic and sadistic as the 1930s and 1940s variant, whilst at the same time being less less “hopeful”, less “peaceful”, less “pastoral” and less pro-social.

We are in a bad place. And there are true crazies in the Trump orbit. But this seems far-fetched.

El Salvador’s prisons are horrendous facilities, but they are not concentration camps, let alone extermination facilities. Speculating in vague terms about the possibility of World War III, is not the same as setting a timetable for the invasion of Poland. Dramatic climate change will be terrible, but it will be a new kind of terrible, not like the nightmarish visions of the 20th century.

Not only is the historical comparison far-fetched. But for progressives to focus their attention on that maniacal strain of the current far-right is to my mind an evasion of the rather more unsettling fact that Trumpism as a whole may have the attraction that it does not because it promises the “end times”, but because compared to the actually existing alternative in the USA today, the Democrats, it is actually more willing to talk about the future and to do so in bold and bright terms.

I will address two aspects not discussed by Klein and Taylor in two separate posts. The second will be about the most mercurial and distinctive element of Trump 2.0, his association with the neo exceptionalist, techno futurism of the likes of Musk.

But the first response has to focus on the aspect of Trumpism that obsesses the mainstream commentariat, but goes unmentioned by Klein and Taylor, trade policy.

How might one characterize Trump’s trade policy as offering a future?

White in one of his perceptive contributions argues that an effective politics of the future does three things:

• It provides a vantage point of critique.

• It constitutes collectivity.

• It mobilizes that collectivity for sacrifice, through commitment. Believing in a collective future makes you willing to make sacrifices now.

We may think Trump’s trade policy silly and counterproductive. Presumably Klein and Taylor think tariffs too mundane even to incorporate them into their vision of what Trumpism is.

Or, perhaps, tariffs fall under the category of retrofuturism. They offer not the future but a return to the industrial past.

But Trump’s trade policy is clearly intended to deliver on all three dimensions of a politics of the future. And this comes as quite a shock.

• Their tariffs are based on a critique of the status quo, which they attribute to self-interested liberal elites.

• They do, indeed, seek to rally what the Trumpists imagine to be a “blue-collar nation”. You might dismiss this as retrofuturism. I have. But if you go down that route you must also acknowledge that in this regard Trumpism is in direct continuity with Bidenomics and many strands of Green New Deal thinking. As recently as 9 months ago it took a certain non conformist spirit to call into question the manufacturing-based vision of the American future touted by most American progressives. After all it put you in the same camp as Larry Summers. To this day there are Americans on the left fighting a forlorn rearguard action for industrial policy and protectionism amidst Trump’s shit storm.

• Thirdly, what is truly original about the Trump-Vance project is that it not only rejects the neoliberal past and summons the spirit of blue collar America, it does so with a rhetoric of sacrifice. For the first time we have an American politics that actually talks about getting by with less. Of course it is not by accident that this new rhetoric of self-sufficiency is overtly gendered. It is dolls, and washing-machines, Chinese-made household goods that are the target. The gendered domestic order is affirmed at the same time as the proper masculinity of industrial work is affirmed.

It may be true that the national economists simply did not understand. They may have believed foreigners will pay. It will be embarrassing when they discover that American consumers and businesses will bear a hefty share. They hate it when Amazon threatens to spell out the reason for the up-pricing.

But when push comes to shove, Trump and his spokespeople do not flinch.

Yes! They believe that if they want a better future, Americans must accept that they don’t really need all the stuff in those Chinese shipping containers. America’s “baby girls” will have to get by with fewer Barbie dolls.

As Obama says “Imagine if I had done any of this”.

The embarrassment for advocates of the Green New Deal and Bidenomics is that in pursuit of their visions of the future, Trump’s national economic strategists are far bolder in what they demand of the American public than their opponents in the Democratic party ever were. Trump’s trade policy is, in fact, what Green New Deal advocates never dared to be: A direct challenge to prevailing norms of American consumerism in the name of a better future.

This may turn out to be a political miscalculation. It may be that Trump and his crew are utopians with a political death wish. They may be crushed at the mid-terms. That will be a relief. It will be a particularly unmitigated joy for mainstream Democrats with the most minimal vision of what is possible. It will be joy not just because the GOP loses but because the timidity of the Biden and Obama administrations will be confirmed.

But what if the GOP are not crushed? As White says, you find out the real limits of the future only by challenging them. At the very least we should acknowledge that that is what the Trump administration is doing.

With thanks to Columbia class. HISTGR8989_001_2025

Part II to follow.

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