Trumpism is not going away by itself. That’s what the news of the past week, month and year have shown. Whatever you want to call the conflict we’re in now--a Cold Civil War, a profound partisan divide, etc., and however you want to complicate it by looking at groups or communities that are neither deep-blue nor deep-red--that conflict is not simply going to fade away or subside.
Far-right conservatism is renewing itself continuously and has been since Newt Gingrich’s Contract With America, Trumpism is its latest regenerative surge. Trumpism is also not going to settle for a share of power: it has crossed a political Rubicon. All or nothing. One faction or the other will in relative terms “win” or gain a sustained advantage, or some form of negotiated cease-fire or compact will come along. Or, like contemporary Israel and other liberal democracies at various moments in the last 150 years, the U.S. will continue to walk a knife’s edge indefinitely where every election, every policy, every crisis is a struggle to the potential death between two evenly matched sociopolitical coalitions. Many people say, “But that can’t go on forever.” It can as long as both factions can withstand the attrition from such prolonged uncertainty.
So if this is in some sense war, it’s time to stop thinking in terms of conventional day-to-day political strategies to pass this bill or that initiative. If you’re in a war and you mean to win it, what do you do?
You do a full strategic assessment of the enemy’s assets and weaknesses and of your own. Hopefully without the kind of blinders that many military leaders put on in order to flatter themselves or please their political commanders. That includes the crucial question: why are we in this situation in the first place, and what would it take to end it without the uncertainty of conflict or the waste of resources? Why is there such enmity? Is there a peace or a workable truce? You ask all of that as dispassionately and truthfully as you can if you want to win--or even just survive.
Why is the other side our enemies? Why are we fighting at all?
Since 2015 and arguably back to the late 1990s, this question has dominated public culture that isn’t a dedicated conservative space.
In the 1980s, the answer seemed simpler (but wasn’t, really): the right wanted to reverse social and cultural changes in American society since the early 1960s and they wanted to reduce the power of government over social and economic life.
Are those still reasonable assumptions? No, because it’s plain that “small government” is not (and maybe never was) a real objective on the American right. More it was “law is for thee and not for me”: government to control one’s social enemies and indulge one’s social allies.
The right has renewed its appeal to people younger than those who came of age before 1960 and lived through the changes of the subsequent decades. Positions that were fringe positions even in Reagan-era conservatism are now mainstream in the Republican Party. Republican politicians may have always had an authoritarian streak in the post-1945 era but not like Trumpists do.
The underlying explanations for Trumpism are generally:
Propaganda and Social Media
That Trumpism is the result of having a major network devoted to far-right propaganda 24/7 and the intensifying feedback loops of misinformation and mobilization that social media has enabled. This is the explanation that many liberals turn to preferentially both because it somewhat indemnifies the ‘foot soldiers’ on the other side and offers a plausible strategic doctrine: “if only we could stop or cripple the enemy media platforms, some people on the other side would peel away or become inactive.”
Class Conflict
In contrast, many on the left disdain this line of explanation, insisting that Trump’s supporters are not “working-class whites”, because if they unquestionably and predominantly were, some think it would complicate our own internal dedication to social justice. Typically, the argument against identifying Trump’s base as such is made by looking at household income data from voter surveys or in correlations to Trump-majority counties and finding that there’s considerable evidence that Trump voters on average have considerably higher incomes than “working-class” would suggest. That’s a pretty crude measure for assessing socioeconomic identity: a kulak is still a peasant even if he’s rich in relative measure. The metric that should worry everyone is still college-educated vs. no college education or only a 2-year degree: the overwhelming alignment of the latter with Trump voters is a clear indication that there’s some socioeconomic/class difference structuring this struggle. It’s a complicated measure because of the generational unevenness of college degrees (e.g., the oldest Americans are also the group with the largest proportion of non-college attendees). It’s a horrific mistake to understand this as a division between knowledge and ignorance: college education here should be understood as a proxy for some form of class division, where the college-educated (justifiably or otherwise) have access to economic opportunities that non-college goers do not.
Spatial Distribution
Certainly urban v. rural is a big part of this struggle, and it’s the thing that most aligns the current cleavage in the United States with similar cleavages all over the world. The American political system grants more electoral power to sparsely distributed or rural populations, so this is an especially aggravated contributing issue in the U.S. Understanding the war in these terms is complicated because it encompasses questions of class inequity and political economy on one hand (cities have vastly superior access to the fruits of neoliberal globalization) and antagonisms between deeply divergent cultural formations on the other. This entire line of thought also misleads. The state of Wyoming went for Donald Trump 70-30, but 30% is still a lot of Wyoming’s voting population. California went for Biden 63-34, but 34% of California is 6 million people, compared to Wyoming’s total population of around 500,000. More people voted for Trump in densely urban and suburban Orange County than live in Wyoming. But this is one major reason to think this will always be a Cold Civil War rather than in any sense a territorial conflict, because no matter where you go, from Massachusetts to Idaho, the two sides are much more proximate and entangled than either might like to think.
Hegemony and Self-Interest
This is the go-to explanation of the conflict for most on the left: that the other side is bidding to reclaim, expand, or intensify its domination over the rest of American society and to recenter all forms of political and social power in whiteness, heterosexuality and masculinity, e.g., to serve their own interests. There’s a lot to this line of thinking, especially if it also takes seriously the thought that the last thirty years have genuinely threatened to replace that with a society that might still be defined by inequality but where the elite is pluralistic in racial, sexual and gendered terms. On the other hand, there’s some tension between this argument and the sociological particulars of Trumpism (and liberal/progressive coalitions). Moreover, it indemnifies liberals and progressives from having to inventory their own forms of motivating self-interest.
Culture, Ideology, Religion
This is the center of an old argument on the left and I’m not going to resolve it here, but at least you were running down the list of reasons why there’s a war, you’d have to include this line of explanation in your inventory: that there is a deep underlying set of ideas, practices and commitments that is not necessarily derived from self-interest or political economy that drives both sides onward, a drive that will retain its motivational force even if there is relief for real or perceived economic injustices on offer.
So if that’s the inventory of underlying explanations, where might that lead grand strategists in conflict planning?
Strategic considerations
Consumer power
All the interminable debates about “cancel culture” tend to obscure what’s really going on here strategically, which is that progressives and liberals are a huge proportion of the consumer economy, most especially when it comes to discretionary spending. Boycotts are a time-honored strategic weapon in sociopolitical struggles: they have become generalized and continuous in this war. Brand competition with mass-market necessities (soap, toothpaste, processed foods, etc.) now dictates access to as much of the market as possible--goods are not nearly as segmented by gender and racein their marketing or advertising as they were in 1970 even though Irish Spring and Secret deodorant are still being sold. If you get put in the crossfire because you did an advertisement one side didn’t like or you contributed to a candidate or you did or did not express an opinion on January 6th and you have to choose, you’ll choose the faction that is associated with the most cultural power, the most spending power, and the widest range of social groups. That’s liberal/progressives. You’d rather not lose the Trumpists, but you also know that they don’t necessarily stick to their declared boycotts anyway, whereas the liberal-progressive faction often does. If you’re selling more upmarket discretionary products and cultural works, it’s much more of a no-brainer: not only are liberal-progressives your main or only market, your workplace cultures are also likely aligned in that direction as well. There’s a set of consumer markets that are aligned with Trumpism, but they’re highly particular. Gun manufacturers can’t really imagine that there’s a vast liberal-progressive market that they could tap into (unless this war goes really hot, at which point I doubt guns will remain available for purchase in a conventional economy anyway). This is an area of strategic strength for liberal-progressives and they should continue to use it to the maximum degree--it is increasingly forcing Republican state leaders to push into crude moves to regulate the agency of businesses and individuals that may well backfire on them in multiple ways.
Workplace power
This is centrally what the struggle over vaccine mandates is about, now that the covid-19 vaccines have become a proxy for sociopolitical loyalty. This is a dangerous terrain for liberal-progressives because they do in fact dominate the management of many large corporations and other employers, e.g., this strategic move is available to them if they choose to use it. It’s dangerous because this kind of power is fundamentally neoliberal and thus self-defeating to most of what liberals and progressive claim to want to achieve. Using the institutional power of workplace hierarchies and compliance regimes to compel people to accept liberal-progressive ideologies or commitments not only is a powerful mobilizing tool for Trumpism, it is a weapon that destroys the village it means to save. (Moreover, if workplace power of this kind is further normalized in legal terms, it makes that power potentially available to Trumpism wherever it has electoral power already--as has happened in red states in public institutions, including universities.)
Economic power, more broadly
This is a vexed domain that amounts to a strategic draw. People living in Trumpist counties and communities depend on cities and suburbs elsewhere in their states in profound ways, but the opposite is also true. More importantly, in some sense, both sides are dependent on global-scale supply chains and markets that they have no direct political authority over. Trumpist farmers in Iowa are producing for markets outside the U.S.; progressive-liberal consumers in cities (and rural consumers) are getting a lot of their fresh food from Mexico. Almost no durable goods in the world are being produced entirely within the borders of one country any more. This is the terrain of mutually assured destruction on some level, but if push comes to shove, it favors urban/suburban progressive-liberal forces. If the moment came where a general strike actually shut down the top twenty or more largest cities in the U.S., rural communities would take a serious economic hit as well, whereas if rural communities went on strike or threatened to withhold what they supply to the cities, that would relatively easy to circumvent or ignore. If this is a Cold Civil War, then here Grant’s tactics of attrition are relevant. The cities can endure being cut off from the American countryside; the countryside can’t endure the reverse.
Numbers and their distribution
Trump and his supporters love the electoral maps that show most of the territory of the United States marked in red. Liberal-progressives love the maps--or the statistics--that show just how big in raw numbers their blue counties are. And the polling data and electoral outcomes that show that when both sides mobilize their maximum strength, the liberal-progressive side is bigger. In terms of grand strategy, though, what matters more than the raw size of either side is the distribution of both sides. Cities are extremely difficult to control if the strong majority of their inhabitants are set against a governing regime. Even the most autocratic regimes on the planet fear their cities and require continuous military and police power to keep them under control--and that control takes a serious toll on the productivity and responsiveness of the national economy. On the other hand, if sparsely distributed populations are highly antagonistic to a ruling regime and they live in territories favorable to evading or eluding surveillance or direct control, they’re a continuous danger to security and territorial integrity. If this conflict gets worse, both sides have strategic advantages here. A general strike in cities aimed at a Trumpist takeover would put enormous stresses on a rising authoritarianism and might cost it unquestioned control over its security forces. An even more desperately angry and mobilized right with organized militias in many rural red counties might be able to use violence directly as it was used at the end of Reconstruction or in the early 20th Century--lynching, poll intimidation and much more could become common again.
Means of violence
Speaking of police, military and militias, here there’s little question: the right owns these. The upper echelons of US military leadership remain highly professionalized and dedicated to civilian control and legal compliance, but a volunteer military that recruits primarily from populations that see military service as one of their few economic opportunities and that feels the disdain of educated liberal-progressives is not going to break for liberal-progressives if push comes to shove. Municipal and rural police forces are strongly leaning to the right and are accustomed to ignoring or circumventing the political authority of liberal-progressive governing structures. And the guns are in the hands of Trumpists. In strategic terms, liberal-progressives have to do everything in their power to avoid this Cold Civil War from becoming “hot”. People may decry “culture war”, but culture and economy are the only favorable terrains for liberal-progressives. If it comes to urban general strikes versus armed suppression, not only is that really bad for everybody, it will be in the short term at least a losing campaign for us. Even the most hopeful scenario you could possibly imagine here--a military leadership that decides to head off the suspension of the Constitution by removing an incipient regime from power--is hopeless, because it is just a different road to the same undemocratic end.
Culture war
On the other hand, American liberals and progressives are on the whole pretty good at making culture that spreads or conveys their aspirations and they have a dominant position within most culture industries. Precisely because of that, however, it’s a strategic terrain to view with care. When have a strategic advantage in a conflict, you tend to lean on it too heavily and use it too incautiously. The Trumpist right may look crude or easily mocked from where we sit in terms of their culture-making, but they achieve their main goal really well, which is to increase attachment to their side and the coherence of their social coalition, to draw the lines in the most manichean way possible. They’re much more coherent in their planning, as well--the fake furor over “critical race theory” was completely coordinated. They’re also just as good as liberal-progressives at spotting overreach or vulnerability in cultural works and messages on the other side and making hay out of that. Liberal-progressives also have an infamous tendency to turn culture war against their own coalition, in part because they’re coming from a more genuinely pluralistic aspirational vision.
Coalitional coherence
This is a bad strategic problem for liberal-progressives in certain ways. Their coalition is built from some genuinely divergent social constituencies whose outlooks and underlying socioeconomic situation pull in opposite directions. White suburbanites, highly educated cosmopolitan professionals of all races, impoverished Black and Latino urban communities, rural Black and Latino communities, etc. do not naturally align on a lot of key issues. Many people complain that the Democrats keep relying on a reactive strategy, that all they really stand for is “Not Trump”, but that’s a reflection of the potential fissures within the coalition. The most ironclad alignment all members of the coalition have is that Trump and Trumpism is anathema. And even there, there are worries. If Trump himself were gone and the GOP leadership was more competent and tactically savvy, they might well peel off more Latino voters in socially conservative households or in Latino communities that are not especially approving of more recent waves of immigration. Or they might reacquire some of the white suburbanites that Trump has lost--the liberal-progressive coalition is always vulnerable to having some of its membership accept “soft white supremacism” if they start to feel their own jobs or status is threatened by pluralism.
The Trumpist coalition, on the other hand, is pretty damn solid. Its solidity is also its weakness: it is what prevents Trumpism from solving the problem of its minority status via adding new constituencies and it is what has pushed Trumpists so aggressively towards openly anti-democratic measures. Liberal-progressives (and never-Trumpist Republicans, who are a surpassingly tiny and justifiably mistrusted group) keep expecting that move towards overt authoritarianism to cost the Trumpist some member of their coalition, but it hasn’t happened yet and as far as I can tell is never going to happen, even if or when Trump or his doppleganger reclaims the Presidency by controlling state-level electoral mechanisms and forcing them to declare in his favor. On the other hand, liberal-progressives can grow their coalition: they can activate groups that don’t participate that often in elections, they can recruit anyone who feels threatened by the potential ascension of Trumpism, a group that gets larger everytime the Trumpists move beyond rhetoric into real intrusions into the existing rights and practices of American civil society. The liberal-progressive coalition may be prone to internal division but it’s also the only group with the internal diversity and dynamism to adapt and move tactically and socially. That’s a big strength, most of the time.
Real and imagined grievances and deprivations; real and imagined cultural and ideological commitments
On one hand, liberal-progressives share a lot of aligned values even if they tend to get there from some pretty different starting points. Educated liberal-progressives tend to live social lives that are in substantial alignment with long-standing moral principles in American life that fifty years ago would have been called “conservative” or “traditional family values”. (Arguably secular liberals sound more like Christian social reformers of past generations than almost any avowedly Christian public figure does at present.) Liberal-progressives have an accurate view of history and existing society and a real understanding of where structural injustice and inequity have been situated in American life and the unfinished transformational business that derives from that history. They tend to have an optimistic vision of a better future still despite the bleakness of the times. These are all assets in terms of commanding authority over existing structures of political, legal and cultural authority and legitimacy. They’re not assets when it comes to peeling off members of the Trumpist coalition, who are unmoved by their own hypocrisies and contradictions regardless of how often those are pointed to.
On the other side of things, there is nothing more profoundly motivating and mobilizing that a feeling that something is being taken away from you, even if that feeling is unjustified (or what’s being taken is something you had no right to have in the first place). And Trumpists have that feeling both because they are constantly being told that they should and because it’s true (again, however justified their relative loss of privilege might be). To quote Arlie Hochschild’s book title, they really are “strangers in their own land” in the sense that they are everywhere surrounded by reminders that they live in a country that they do not have favored or exclusive control over. E.g., for white evangelical Christians, not being the completely dominant and unchallenged norm is tantamount to being targeted for eradication; for white conservative heterosexuals, not being the only people who are in television commercials or video games is tantamount to “replacement”. It doesn’t matter if their feelings are unjust or unfair, they’re strong and they will continue to keep their coalition united in resentment. Even if they win, they’ll be facing a country whose real pluralism has been revealed beyond any ability to suppress that revelation; small wonder that some Trumpists are increasingly flirting with exterminationist sentiments.
Education
Liberal-progressives tend to assume this is an area of great strategic advantage to them, that they live in “the reality-based community”. They may even believe a la Foucault that knowledge is power. It turns out that’s only true for people who submit themselves to knowledge in that form. The persistent error about liberals and progressives is to assume that “if only the other people knew X, they’d stop thinking Y”, that we just have to get the word out. More energy and resources are wasted in the name of that proposition than anything else liberals and leftists undertake. It’s magical thinking of a dangerous kind. More education is not strategically useful in the sense of peeling off any part of the Trumpist coalition: that much has become clear. Trumpists are willing quite literally to die in order to prove their loyalty to their own forms of ignorance, and their own forms of ignorance transcend and transgress any educational credential they might have acquired. This reminds me very much of an earlier generation of naive white scholars in the mid-20th Century who assumed that “Westernization” and “tradition” were binary opposites and that the latter would replaced wholly by a linear process of transformation in modern societies. It turns out that you can wholly accept conventional biomedical treatments and the moral propositions of witchcraft or other ‘customary’ bodies of spiritual understanding all at once. Trumpists live with their contradictions without the distress that liberal-progressives imagine to be inescapable.
The only way to force those contradictions to a breaking point, to make them a new strategic asset—requires damaging some of the core ethical commitments of liberalism. E.g., not just vaccine mandates but effectively requiring a loyalty oath at the point of medical service or technological access: “I believe in science, I believe in data, now give me my aspirin and my sewer system”. Quite aside from the self-destructive impact of that strategic move, even fantasizing it reveals another devil loose in this whole fight, namely, capitalism, which is also perfectly able to ignore these contradictions--able to command the labor of scientists and technologists without necessarily having any epistemic respect for what science or education know. (Exhibit A: anthropogenic climate change.) Much as a medical expert might dream of requiring people to accept what education and science show us about how bodies and medicines work in order to receive treatment, there’s money to be made and it’s agnostic about whether anybody accepts that particular knowledge is in fact particular power.
In other words, reality may be on your side—you may be right about climate change or about the foolishness of Texas’ approach to energy independence or covid-19 or the reality of American history but that’s not much of a strategic asset. Even when being wrong visits genuine harm on Trumpists themselves, they don’t really care and they are capaciously capable of delusional reattributions of the cause of their suffering. I’m personally fond of saying “I told you so” but to date I haven’t noticed it changing anything—if anything it often makes someone more prone to ignore me the next time.
The value of strategic overview
This kind of exercise--and I’m sure there’s a lot I’m overlooking or where my assessment is profoundly debatable--lifts us up out of the reactive world of everyday political to-and-fro. What happens next with the infrastructure bill is not going to determine the grand strategic outcomes of the next decade or two of American life, contrary to the crabbed and suffocating discourse of mainstream punditry. For the most part, those are not the contingencies that will shape our perilous moment towards some overall resolution. Even when they are, the missing link in many public discussions is why they might be--about why a particular battle in the war might have strategic implications that shift the overall tide of the conflict. Every war has some battles that don’t really matter. Or battles won or lost that conceal how it’s really going underneath it all.
For me, a strategic audit of the Cold Civil War shows that liberal-progressives are more dependent on conventional cultural, social and political institutions (though not necessarily the major elected governing bodies, which are uncertain and unreliable allies in all this) than they might want to be, and that some of their most powerful strategic assets are therefore shrouded to some extent in mystification and misdirection. “Cancel culture” is incredibly important and powerful tactically precisely because it’s a move to control how certain kinds of revenues flow and to weaponize those revenues. That’s nothing to apologize for. The liberal critics of cancel culture are, if they mean to fight Trumpism, essentially the equivalent of a ridiculous officer corps accustomed to getting their own way and insisting that the only way to succeed in trench warfare is cavalry charges and sending the troops into massed machine gun fire through no man’s land.
But a strategic assessment also should warn us off of some imagined or fantasized moves and warn us to real dangers in others. We have assets we haven’t moved into the field yet and rightfully so: if the time comes that we must, we will be in supreme danger already. Certain terrains of conflict are profoundly unfavorable to us both in terms of playing into the strengths of the other side and making it impossible to actually win out in the end, by leaving everything we hope to achieve in smoking ruins.
That’s the value of war as metaphor: not in summoning people to a false sense of total conflict or leading to a ridiculous waste of resources, as in “the war on drugs”. It is not a call to aggression or violence. But nothing so electrically jolts us into understanding that everything we believe in and want, every better possibility, is (as it often has been) under attack. It is to remind ourselves that once a struggle is this profound, this deep, and this expansive, and once its stakes are established as the rise of our dreams versus the end of all we might hope for, then we can’t be blind to the existential scale of our decisions and our actions--with all that “we” and “us” imply and require. This is not just a burden for each of us alone. We have to be alive to the gravity of our moment. Fighting is full of terrifying contingencies; ghosts haunt every decision and moment. We can’t just react our way through the maze, or vote our way past a conflict that threatens the end of voting. We have to think bigger and understand how and when we are strong—and why we are.
Image credit: Photo by Hasan Almasi on Unsplash