By BRANKO MILANOVIC*
The wild four-week ride, which still doesn't seem to have run out of steam, confirms the idea that the new Donald Trump will govern very differently from the old one.
To say that Donald Trump, in his new incarnation, is different from 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 things internationally and domestically. It has been a wild four-week ride that still seems to have run its course and that has confirmed the idea that the new Donald Trump will govern very differently from the old one.
There are two reasons for this difference.
I’ll be very brief about the first reason, which is less important and has to do with Donald Trump’s personality. When he came to power in 2017, he clearly didn’t expect to even win the Republican nomination, much less the presidency. So he was unprepared and unsure of what to do. His ideology was a mishmash of things he’d learned during his careers in real estate and the Miss Universe pageant, and, having never worked in government in the broad sense or been elected, he had no idea how to technically implement the vague things he believed in.
Donald Trump’s ideology may not have changed since then, but as an individual he has matured in eight years. Indeed, no one who has been subjected to eight years of continuous investigations, abuse by most of the media, endless lawsuits, being forced to sit in courtrooms for days on end with his misdeeds (real and imagined) exposed, being impeached twice, and coming close to being assassinated at least once, could emerge from that experience an unchanged person.
All attempts to put him in his place or to get rid of him politically have failed. He must now think, as many in his position do, that he is a man of destiny. As such, he must realize that he must leave some lasting legacy.
The most important and timely change from Trump #1 is that he now has Elon Musk and his merry band of convention-busters who are proceeding to dismantle the state apparatus. What they are doing under the title of the Department of Government Efficiency seems new to people who have had no experience or even knowledge of any revolutionary change.
The last revolutionary change of this kind in the United States was effected by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1930s; which included the crushing of the old state, the creation of a new one, and the attribution to it of numerous new functions, most of which lasted for decades. Marxism says that when you have a revolutionary movement, that movement, in order to survive, has to destroy the old state apparatus and create a new one.
Marx wrote about this in connection with the Paris Commune: “The next attempt at a French revolution [the Commune] will no longer be, as before, to transfer the bureaucratic-military machine from one hand to another, but to smash it [Marx’s emphasis]” (Letter to Kugelman, April 12, 1871). Vladimir Lenin implemented it later, when he came to power. Without control of the state apparatus, any revolution is incomplete and risks being overthrown.
The current revolution has certain (so to speak) American characteristics. The American state has become a huge machine that is largely unrelated to whoever is in power. This was noticed by the ideologues of the Trumpist revolution: the state apparatus continued to function and produce the same results regardless of who was in power.
While this happens in many countries, it has been exacerbated in the US by the American specificity where much of the decision-making has been “outsourced” or taken away from the executive and legislative branches. The Treasury Department is run by Wall Street (Paulson, Rubin, Mnuchin, Brady, Summers and how much), under both Democrat and Republican rule, the Federal Reserve is legally independent, and the United States was known in the 19th century, and has since become, a “system of courts and parties” in which the judiciary actually makes many of the policy decisions that, in parliamentary systems, are made by politicians.
When these elements are put together, one quickly realizes that the scope of executive power is quite limited, not only by what are conventionally considered to be the limits imposed by Congress and the independent judiciary, but also by the fact that large segments of decision-making (monetary and fiscal policy or regulatory policy) are made by the “apparatchiks”, which are independent of the ruling party and pay little attention to it.
The ideologists of the Trumpist revolution (and here I have in mind especially N.S. Lyons, who produced several ideologically very clear texts, in particular The China Convergence and American Strong Gods) have noted another phenomenon that limits the scope of their revolution. The state apparatus has, over the years, been populated by extreme liberals who obviously do not share the worldview of the Trumpist revolutionaries. The state apparatus has thus become further and ideologically isolated from the Trumpist executive.
Revolutionaries believe that the state apparatus has been filled with liberals because their dominance in the intellectual sphere, through control of major American universities, the world of think tanks and quasi-governmental institutions. The liberal point of view has come to dominate all those who are part of the state apparatus or participate in para-state activities. (Obviously, the people who populate the apparatus will select people with similar views to help or replace them.)
Ideologues attribute the rise of a liberal professional management class (PMC) to its dominance in knowledge production. I do not find this explanation particularly persuasive because it assumes that the site of conflict is ideology, far removed from the “infrastructure” or site of social reproduction where more materialist ideologies tend to see their main contradictions expressed. In any case, dominance in the production of intellectual knowledge translates, through the functionaries, into control of the state apparatus.
If this diagnosis holds, then it is clear that revolutionaries must take control of and/or destroy the existing state apparatus. This means that the purge must go far beyond the usual changes when new presidents come to power, which are limited to the top and affect only political appointments. If the state apparatus is to be taken by storm, then the purge must be much more thorough and political appointments must be made much more thoroughly, even in ordinary technical positions.
Given that many instruments of government are in any case exempt from executive control, that the ideological “hegemony” of the right would take decades (if ever) to become real, and faced with an enemy government apparatus, Trumpist revolutionaries conclude that even if they won election after election, they would achieve little. The “foam” at the top would change, but nothing more.
I think this fact provides a logical explanation for the zeal of revolutionaries to make change more lasting. It is sometimes dismissively claimed that revolutionaries want to destroy the “deep state” and then argued that no such deep state exists in America. This is a naive objection that takes the meaning of “deep state” as it was originally defined in Pakistan and Turkey (establishment military not controlled by the government). This does not actually exist, or certainly does not exist in its entirety, in the US.
On the other hand, the attempt to seize control of the state is attributed to partisanship. This is a meaningless criticism, since partisanship is, by definition, shared by all political convictions and all political ideologies. Only those who live in an ethereal fantasy world can claim that national and international economic decisions are a pure matter of technical execution. This is the argument used by the elites to claim that they have special technical knowledge that makes them nonpartisan and that, therefore, they should be left alone to do whatever they are doing.
Both criticisms of the revolutionaries’ actions miss the point. The revolutionaries’ goal is to take control of the state apparatus, which in the specific conditions of the United States means purging its officials (as happened during the Chinese Cultural Revolution or the post-communist transitions in Eastern Europe). This goal has nothing to do with the existence or otherwise of a Turkish-style “deep state” or political partisanship. It has to do with power.
The battle we are witnessing between Elon Musk and his supporters and different parts of the US state are the usual battles we see when a revolutionary movement wants to leave a deeper mark on the future.
*Branko Milanovic is a professor of economics at the City University of New York. Author of, among other books, Capitalism without rivals (However).
Translation: Fernando Lima das Neves.
Originally posted on the author's social media.
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