Donald Trump was still just a landlord and TV bully when Steve Bannon, later to become the president’s on-and-off-again demagogue in chief, announced himself a pitiless enemy of the administrative state. Self-dramatizing as he is, Bannon’s words carried an undeniable frisson: “I am a Leninist and Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that is my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down and destroy all of today’s establishment.”
Insurgents and revolutionaries across the political spectrum have sought, in different ways and for different reasons, to smash the state. Until recently, however, few have been openly critical of democracy. Even its most avowed opponents, for years now, have used the language of democracy to argue for and justify its abridgment. That’s not the case anymore. Take Stephen Moore, one of Trump’s economic advisors, for example. A gold standard conservative, former president of the Club of Growth, and a member of both the Wall Street Journal editorial board and the Heritage Foundation, made his views very clear in 2016: “Capitalism is a lot more important than democracy. I’m not even a big believer in democracy.”
A good deal of what the new administration is doing is merely a continuation of previous Republican and Democratic administrations and their familiar urge to safeguard the well-being of the rich and powerful. Cutting down the welfare state undergirded Ronald Reagan’s counterrevolution and was consolidated by his successors, Republicans and Democrats alike. Feeding the war machine has been a bipartisan endeavor for as long as anyone can remember.
Yet some of the most draconian measures adopted by the new administration seem categorically different. They escape the logic of capitalist…
Auteur: Steve Fraser
