I would like to add to Dr. Fukuyama's point by highlighting the discursive strategy at work, a strategy that amounts to an attempt to replace democratic with authoritarian norms.
The "bold" actions of the Trump Administrations to usurp power (violating the Impoundment Control Act being just one of many examples already) requires an explanation. Their approach is brutish, designed to intimidate and humiliate perceived "enemies of the people" and to of course score political points with the sizable minority who share their disdain for both "the deep state" and dangerous foreign interests, especially immigrants. But the projection of this strength belies weakness. On one hand, they assault our values of due process and law and, by extension, any remaining standards of decency toward others “not like us.” Just as importantly, though, is the open manner in which this assault is occurring. Its very openness is what communicates authority.
And therein lies a paradox which reveals the awkward historical moment Trump and Trumpism finds itself in. What we are witnessing now is, at least in part, an attempt to re-enact America’s revolutionary moment but now refracted through an illiberal lens of power for power’s sake which implicitly acknowledges the loss of a unifying cultural narrative. It is not that government was ever not dominated by special interests. And Trump's brand of illiberal democracy is not the first to cast itself as the savior of a bygone era when traditional American values operated with little question.
But by acting above the law, Trump and his followers implicitly lay exclusive claim to America's cultural patrimony as the only "real Americans.” As they would have it, theirs is a legacy of exceptionalism centered on America’s unique status as world creator but also world destroyer: “we” and we alone may create laws and therefore break them. The effectiveness of this rhetorical strategy hinges on the unconditional and shameless manner it is executed. In the political theater they are now staging, Trump's strategists know exactly what they are doing. But the enactment of this myth is paradoxical in that it claims rational power in its openness—as if to say, what we are doing is self-evidently good for the country—while at the same time demanding obedience at the expense of whole classes of people considered as “other.” By contrasting itself with other classes of people, Trumpism thereby objectifies itself, and “power” becomes irrational.
This is not say that all actors inside the Trump Administration act with one mind. But the various recent executive actions are nevertheless framed inside a larger story of change which we are now enjoined to believe.
Whenever actions are successfully framed as stories of fixing, restoring justice, liberation, salvation, or similar—that is, a story with a bad beginning, heroic response, and happy ending—the entire experience becomes self-validating. This is because any change can be made to carry a signal or message about a change. The response, the middle part, is good because the problem ended (obviously), while the story as a whole is true because the change—the problem ending—happened (again, obviously). (The whole punctuation of experience is important, which is why the time horizons we participate in, our attentions spans, are important.) As an action, the classification is classified as good, and this in turn frames the entire classification sequence as true. It is good and therefore true and true and therefore good.
The trick hinges on treating the problem in contrast to its treatment: not normal becomes then self-evidently a problem to fix in the self-evident (normal) way. Expressed in terms of formal logic, the predicate function becomes its own argument. Such an error in logical typing is strictly forbidden as it leads to nonsense. But in the real world of actions, these sorts of errors happen all the time, becoming their own truths. In fact, ideology and corollary political rhetoric are most effective when they are enacted. And the phenomenon is not limited to enactments of hero myths. Related problems of logical typing are evident in all kinds of human (and even some non-human mammalian) affairs such as play, threats, and histrionics. In a future post I would like to talk more about this and especially how these sorts of “truths” interact with other senses of truth, from the very personal to grand truths or eternal verities.
Which brings me to accountability. With some understanding of these problems (I recommend reading Gregory Bateson’s work on this, among others), we can be more vigilant, less taken in by the “just so” stories, and therefore less pliable. And we can also call out disingenuous or false discourse. (We can then, for example, see how the Trump Administration’s actions attempt the contradictory tasks of changing norms while claiming timeless norms and how, by extension, normalization paradoxically requires non-response from us). This applies to all ideologies, lest we forget that the Left is just as prone to the errors as the Right or anyone else “in between.” This is also why I feel it is important that we be open with ourselves and others about our operating assumptions. And not just as individuals, but in all the collectivities we participate in (and we all do). We are not just individuals; we are part of greater wholes, whether we see them or not. This starts with being clear about our purposes, for they define the boundary conditions that define who “we” are to begin with and what kind of world we want to live in.
Trump a couple of hours ago tweeted on X: "He who saves his Country does not violate any Law."
This goes right to my comment I made earlier today...notice the slippage in language where "saves" and "violate" are both used in two different logical orders of abstraction (if he saves a country from its laws being violated, then his saving does not violate any law), setting up a false contrast between them. The framing (or meta-) message enjoins us to see his saving against a backdrop of violation while ignoring the original violation of the idea of laws (that they can only be changed by people, not by an individual).
Sadly, I agree with what you write. But while indeed many aspects of Trumpism are bad in many ways, it seems to me that instead of focusing on that point, US Democrats need to ask themselves why their party is so remarkably unpopular, and how can they change their rhetoric and behavior to regain public approval.
“In his second term, he is demonstrating that he is a radical of a sort that we have not witnessed before in American politics, as if we had somehow elected Vladimir Lenin.”
Um, no. In fact, I’ll go with a WTF? Seriously, who wrote this? I thought Fukuyama was a famous scholar. Did someone hack his byline?
Through civil war, disastrous economic policies, famine, and god knows what else, Lenin directly contributed to the deaths of millions.
Trump, on the other hand, has signed some executive orders banning DEI.
In other words: we did not elect anyone remotely resembling Lenin.
And I say this as someone who voted against Trump and does not care for the seemingly callous nature of his second term as President. I may not like him, but, FFS, he’s no Lenin.
So if the Left wants to successfully discredit Trump, it needs to first stop discrediting itself with these comically outrageous comparisons.
Trump does indeed seem to constitute a break with modern American history. But that does not suddenly lift him into the ranks of history’s greatest villains. Get a f*#king grip!
Trump late yesterday tweeted on X: "He who saves his Country does not violate any Law."
This goes right to my comment I made earlier yesterday. On the flat page or tweet, Trump's statement has the paradoxical logical structure "If A, then (if A, then not B)," which should tip us off that something is wrong. Thankfully, most of us can just feel the wrongness of it.
In addition to the formal paradox, there is also a strange combination of informal logical fallacies involving appeal to authority, the "is-ought" problem (a type of naturalistic fallacy), and circular reasoning at work here as well. And this is because we experience the statement when we read or hear it, which is to say: the propositions of the statement happen over psychological time. In this case, the propositions in "saves his country" and in "does not violate any law" are about change and non-change (where violation is treated as illegitimate change), so when we experience the sequence of propositions as a statement about change, with a beginning and end, the entire experience becomes self-validating (I do not violate laws if I change them). By mirroring it, the speech-act itself reinforces the story it tells.
But only if we follow the metamessage implied in the frame instructing us to ignore the beginning and end of the frame itself. If—and this is the crucial if—we don’t question the start and end points of the story, if we accept that salvation is a given in this argument, that is, that salvation is the only inviolable law (i.e., truth) because the statement comes from Him (“any statements from me are true”), we then have no choice but to evaluate the statement from Him as true and conclude that no laws could be violated during the saving. (Notice how "saves" refers to two orders of change at once.) Put another way, the framing lends an aura of inevitability to the saving, as if it already happened or somehow happens outside of time, which locates Trump's moral agency, his power, outside of history. For the logical fallacy to be pulled off requires political obedience to the speaker, requires giving him (or fetishizing him with) unaccountable power to evaluate what is good and true. The original event—the injunction and our acquiescence—is not marked, but its premise nevertheless operates throughout the entire experience.
Summarizing, we are enjoined by an authority, which points to its utterance as evidence for its truth and goodness, to accept/ignore the original violation of the idea that laws can only be changed by people, not by an individual (or, what amounts to the same democratic idea that laws are only subject to violation by individuals, not the people who own those laws and can therefore change them). The statement by Trump is an attempt to replace democratic norms with an authoritarian one, and it is consistent with other Trump Administration actions since Trump “took office” (ambiguous meaning intended) which all fit within a general narrative of Trump saving America.
As a speech-act, the tweet I think raises the stakes considerably and brings us closer to the brink of a constitutional crisis. It would appear to be a gamble by Trump that the court of public opinion will side with him in a stand-off with the legal courts. He may be right. Perhaps in any chaos that would ensue, Trump and his bad faith actors could use it as pretense for even more assertive and even violent imposition of authority in the name of “saving the Country.” The take-over of two of the three federal branches of government—Congress seems all but irrelevant these days—by a political party beholden to Trump and his core supporters seems to leave the task of accountability, the bulwark against authoritarianism, to the courts and the fourth branch.
Has our cultural nihilism already weakened us to such an extent that Americans will not meet the moment? Or did Trump play his hand too soon and provoke a political confrontation he will lose? It is a big gambit for him and, unfortunately, for all of us.
"In his second term, he is demonstrating that he is a radical of a sort that we have not witnessed before in American politics,...." Francis you are a historian. So maybe you could just go back in history and review your assumption that "we have not witnessed this before." You especially know that history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. One respects your intellect, please leave your TDS at the door and display your reason and wisdom when writing articles concerning a POTUS who is democratically elected, and is changing the direction of the country in which he was elected and will be the leader for the next four years. Also Yashir also mentioned that the dissonance of those who can only critisise that change in direction which the editorial board hoped to re-direct to produce more balanced and unbiased articles that seems not to have filtred through to some of those who write articles for Persuasion. The People have spoken and those who the People rejected will have to regroup, reform and re-engage when the next election cycle happens. The Left side of the ruling classes have to just "look in the political mirror" and define who they are, what they did wrong and climb back into the ring, for another swing. Good luck.
Your posts continue to be extremely valuable. However, this time I think your conclusion -- that Donald Trump is "a very purposeful individual" executing a deliberate strategy -- would benefit from a further conclusion at the most fundamental level: that, with him, everything is personal. He may be systematically pursuing a political strategy, but he's pursuing it out of base impulses: vindictiveness, spite, mortified vanity, lifelong frustration, a perverse will to shock and hurt others.
I'd say we're being subjected to a systematized tantrum assisted by people who find it agreeable.
I would like to add to Dr. Fukuyama's point by highlighting the discursive strategy at work, a strategy that amounts to an attempt to replace democratic with authoritarian norms.
The "bold" actions of the Trump Administrations to usurp power (violating the Impoundment Control Act being just one of many examples already) requires an explanation. Their approach is brutish, designed to intimidate and humiliate perceived "enemies of the people" and to of course score political points with the sizable minority who share their disdain for both "the deep state" and dangerous foreign interests, especially immigrants. But the projection of this strength belies weakness. On one hand, they assault our values of due process and law and, by extension, any remaining standards of decency toward others “not like us.” Just as importantly, though, is the open manner in which this assault is occurring. Its very openness is what communicates authority.
And therein lies a paradox which reveals the awkward historical moment Trump and Trumpism finds itself in. What we are witnessing now is, at least in part, an attempt to re-enact America’s revolutionary moment but now refracted through an illiberal lens of power for power’s sake which implicitly acknowledges the loss of a unifying cultural narrative. It is not that government was ever not dominated by special interests. And Trump's brand of illiberal democracy is not the first to cast itself as the savior of a bygone era when traditional American values operated with little question.
But by acting above the law, Trump and his followers implicitly lay exclusive claim to America's cultural patrimony as the only "real Americans.” As they would have it, theirs is a legacy of exceptionalism centered on America’s unique status as world creator but also world destroyer: “we” and we alone may create laws and therefore break them. The effectiveness of this rhetorical strategy hinges on the unconditional and shameless manner it is executed. In the political theater they are now staging, Trump's strategists know exactly what they are doing. But the enactment of this myth is paradoxical in that it claims rational power in its openness—as if to say, what we are doing is self-evidently good for the country—while at the same time demanding obedience at the expense of whole classes of people considered as “other.” By contrasting itself with other classes of people, Trumpism thereby objectifies itself, and “power” becomes irrational.
This is not say that all actors inside the Trump Administration act with one mind. But the various recent executive actions are nevertheless framed inside a larger story of change which we are now enjoined to believe.
Whenever actions are successfully framed as stories of fixing, restoring justice, liberation, salvation, or similar—that is, a story with a bad beginning, heroic response, and happy ending—the entire experience becomes self-validating. This is because any change can be made to carry a signal or message about a change. The response, the middle part, is good because the problem ended (obviously), while the story as a whole is true because the change—the problem ending—happened (again, obviously). (The whole punctuation of experience is important, which is why the time horizons we participate in, our attentions spans, are important.) As an action, the classification is classified as good, and this in turn frames the entire classification sequence as true. It is good and therefore true and true and therefore good.
The trick hinges on treating the problem in contrast to its treatment: not normal becomes then self-evidently a problem to fix in the self-evident (normal) way. Expressed in terms of formal logic, the predicate function becomes its own argument. Such an error in logical typing is strictly forbidden as it leads to nonsense. But in the real world of actions, these sorts of errors happen all the time, becoming their own truths. In fact, ideology and corollary political rhetoric are most effective when they are enacted. And the phenomenon is not limited to enactments of hero myths. Related problems of logical typing are evident in all kinds of human (and even some non-human mammalian) affairs such as play, threats, and histrionics. In a future post I would like to talk more about this and especially how these sorts of “truths” interact with other senses of truth, from the very personal to grand truths or eternal verities.
Which brings me to accountability. With some understanding of these problems (I recommend reading Gregory Bateson’s work on this, among others), we can be more vigilant, less taken in by the “just so” stories, and therefore less pliable. And we can also call out disingenuous or false discourse. (We can then, for example, see how the Trump Administration’s actions attempt the contradictory tasks of changing norms while claiming timeless norms and how, by extension, normalization paradoxically requires non-response from us). This applies to all ideologies, lest we forget that the Left is just as prone to the errors as the Right or anyone else “in between.” This is also why I feel it is important that we be open with ourselves and others about our operating assumptions. And not just as individuals, but in all the collectivities we participate in (and we all do). We are not just individuals; we are part of greater wholes, whether we see them or not. This starts with being clear about our purposes, for they define the boundary conditions that define who “we” are to begin with and what kind of world we want to live in.
I believe the appropriate term is /tin-pot dictator in the making/
Trump a couple of hours ago tweeted on X: "He who saves his Country does not violate any Law."
This goes right to my comment I made earlier today...notice the slippage in language where "saves" and "violate" are both used in two different logical orders of abstraction (if he saves a country from its laws being violated, then his saving does not violate any law), setting up a false contrast between them. The framing (or meta-) message enjoins us to see his saving against a backdrop of violation while ignoring the original violation of the idea of laws (that they can only be changed by people, not by an individual).
Sadly, I agree with what you write. But while indeed many aspects of Trumpism are bad in many ways, it seems to me that instead of focusing on that point, US Democrats need to ask themselves why their party is so remarkably unpopular, and how can they change their rhetoric and behavior to regain public approval.
I wish your words were not so prescient.
LOLOLOLOL:
“In his second term, he is demonstrating that he is a radical of a sort that we have not witnessed before in American politics, as if we had somehow elected Vladimir Lenin.”
Um, no. In fact, I’ll go with a WTF? Seriously, who wrote this? I thought Fukuyama was a famous scholar. Did someone hack his byline?
Through civil war, disastrous economic policies, famine, and god knows what else, Lenin directly contributed to the deaths of millions.
Trump, on the other hand, has signed some executive orders banning DEI.
In other words: we did not elect anyone remotely resembling Lenin.
And I say this as someone who voted against Trump and does not care for the seemingly callous nature of his second term as President. I may not like him, but, FFS, he’s no Lenin.
So if the Left wants to successfully discredit Trump, it needs to first stop discrediting itself with these comically outrageous comparisons.
Trump does indeed seem to constitute a break with modern American history. But that does not suddenly lift him into the ranks of history’s greatest villains. Get a f*#king grip!
Trump late yesterday tweeted on X: "He who saves his Country does not violate any Law."
This goes right to my comment I made earlier yesterday. On the flat page or tweet, Trump's statement has the paradoxical logical structure "If A, then (if A, then not B)," which should tip us off that something is wrong. Thankfully, most of us can just feel the wrongness of it.
In addition to the formal paradox, there is also a strange combination of informal logical fallacies involving appeal to authority, the "is-ought" problem (a type of naturalistic fallacy), and circular reasoning at work here as well. And this is because we experience the statement when we read or hear it, which is to say: the propositions of the statement happen over psychological time. In this case, the propositions in "saves his country" and in "does not violate any law" are about change and non-change (where violation is treated as illegitimate change), so when we experience the sequence of propositions as a statement about change, with a beginning and end, the entire experience becomes self-validating (I do not violate laws if I change them). By mirroring it, the speech-act itself reinforces the story it tells.
But only if we follow the metamessage implied in the frame instructing us to ignore the beginning and end of the frame itself. If—and this is the crucial if—we don’t question the start and end points of the story, if we accept that salvation is a given in this argument, that is, that salvation is the only inviolable law (i.e., truth) because the statement comes from Him (“any statements from me are true”), we then have no choice but to evaluate the statement from Him as true and conclude that no laws could be violated during the saving. (Notice how "saves" refers to two orders of change at once.) Put another way, the framing lends an aura of inevitability to the saving, as if it already happened or somehow happens outside of time, which locates Trump's moral agency, his power, outside of history. For the logical fallacy to be pulled off requires political obedience to the speaker, requires giving him (or fetishizing him with) unaccountable power to evaluate what is good and true. The original event—the injunction and our acquiescence—is not marked, but its premise nevertheless operates throughout the entire experience.
Summarizing, we are enjoined by an authority, which points to its utterance as evidence for its truth and goodness, to accept/ignore the original violation of the idea that laws can only be changed by people, not by an individual (or, what amounts to the same democratic idea that laws are only subject to violation by individuals, not the people who own those laws and can therefore change them). The statement by Trump is an attempt to replace democratic norms with an authoritarian one, and it is consistent with other Trump Administration actions since Trump “took office” (ambiguous meaning intended) which all fit within a general narrative of Trump saving America.
As a speech-act, the tweet I think raises the stakes considerably and brings us closer to the brink of a constitutional crisis. It would appear to be a gamble by Trump that the court of public opinion will side with him in a stand-off with the legal courts. He may be right. Perhaps in any chaos that would ensue, Trump and his bad faith actors could use it as pretense for even more assertive and even violent imposition of authority in the name of “saving the Country.” The take-over of two of the three federal branches of government—Congress seems all but irrelevant these days—by a political party beholden to Trump and his core supporters seems to leave the task of accountability, the bulwark against authoritarianism, to the courts and the fourth branch.
Has our cultural nihilism already weakened us to such an extent that Americans will not meet the moment? Or did Trump play his hand too soon and provoke a political confrontation he will lose? It is a big gambit for him and, unfortunately, for all of us.
"In his second term, he is demonstrating that he is a radical of a sort that we have not witnessed before in American politics,...." Francis you are a historian. So maybe you could just go back in history and review your assumption that "we have not witnessed this before." You especially know that history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. One respects your intellect, please leave your TDS at the door and display your reason and wisdom when writing articles concerning a POTUS who is democratically elected, and is changing the direction of the country in which he was elected and will be the leader for the next four years. Also Yashir also mentioned that the dissonance of those who can only critisise that change in direction which the editorial board hoped to re-direct to produce more balanced and unbiased articles that seems not to have filtred through to some of those who write articles for Persuasion. The People have spoken and those who the People rejected will have to regroup, reform and re-engage when the next election cycle happens. The Left side of the ruling classes have to just "look in the political mirror" and define who they are, what they did wrong and climb back into the ring, for another swing. Good luck.
Your posts continue to be extremely valuable. However, this time I think your conclusion -- that Donald Trump is "a very purposeful individual" executing a deliberate strategy -- would benefit from a further conclusion at the most fundamental level: that, with him, everything is personal. He may be systematically pursuing a political strategy, but he's pursuing it out of base impulses: vindictiveness, spite, mortified vanity, lifelong frustration, a perverse will to shock and hurt others.
I'd say we're being subjected to a systematized tantrum assisted by people who find it agreeable.
https://thefamilyproperty.blogspot.com/2025/02/the-tiny-man-theory.html