There are still some Trump supporters out there who continue to bill the Trump administration as some kind of great victory for the forces of populism against the “deep state.” A year into the second Trump administration, it is clear this is not a serious position. The populism of the Trump campaign has clearly failed and what we ended up with instead is a continuation and strengthening of the status quo. Over the next three years of this second Trump term, the welfare-warfare state will only get larger. Trump now actively pushes to strengthen the surveillance state, and to massively increase overall defense spending. He points to some miniscule trimming around the edges of the welfare state while overall spending continues to rise and federal deficits are near all-time highs. In turn, these huge deficits will require central-bank intervention to partly monetize the debt, pushing up price inflation.
Far from being some sort of shock to the system in Washington, Trump is governing largely like a business-as-usual Republican. In other words, it should be abundantly obvious by now that there is not going to be anything coming out of this administration that will endanger the governing elites or their institutions which retain a firm grip on Washington institutions and the special interests that drive policy.
This is apparently the best that the “militant” populists could come up with: yet another milquetoast republican administration that will ensure the grave train continues for politically favored allies. This administration is basically just a Marco Rubio administration with some “mean tweets” thrown in for color.
[Read More: “Why America’s Two-Party System Will Never Threaten the True Political Elites“]
The populist “victory” of the Trump administration is perhaps the best evidence yet that a strategy of “vote harder” is simply not going to lead to any significant change of any kind. After all, the media, academia, and even the GOP’s old guard fought tooth and nail to keep Trump out of the White House. And in the end, it was much ado about nothing. Now, just imagine if someone ran for the presidency who actually opposed the regime’s power on principle. That person would simply not be allowed to get the nomination, let alone win.
So, there won’t be any viable candidates who will actually tear down the federal state through legal or constitutional means. That will not be permitted via any federal election. The logic of the welfare state, moreover, ensures that no candidate can hope to get elected while also favoring significant cuts to defense spending, old-age pensions, or any of the beloved federal programs that support millions of Americans on the dole, such as pensioners and government contractors.
The only way significant change comes to this tightly constructed system of patrons and clients will be via a significant crisis that disrupts standards of living. This must be severe enough that it shakes the population’s faith in the regime to the point that people actually begin to question the state’s legitimacy. Only when real economic pain is felt will there be any real change. So long as the most of the population feels comfortable enough with an ample supply of Doordash and pornography and reality TV, the system will be deemed to be working “well enough.”
Eventually, however, the ruling elite, through either miscalculation or laziness or complacency, will no longer be able to deliver on its promises to guarantee ease, safety, and “free” goods and services for a growing population on the dole. Once the elites become unable to buy compliance from the population, the regime will turn to brute force. This, however, can only last as long as the ruling elites are able to draw upon loyal personnel in large enough numbers as to be able to force obedience from the general population. This is easier said than done, especially in a period of economic stagnation or decline. The Soviet Union is a key example. In 1989, when the Soviet Government was crumbling, the Soviet Regime still commanded six million personnel in military uniform. But when the regime tried to shore up control, that enormous military proved to be largely AWOL and of little use.
But then what? Once the ruling elite and its regime cease to be seen as legitimate, and once the usual methods of control fail, what is the next step? Unfortunately, the next step is usually to simply replace the outgoing group of governing elites with a new group. This is the usual progression of events. Uprisings turn into civil wars and civil wars turn into contests over who will control the state’s enormous apparatus of coercion. The French revolution is perhaps the quintessential cautionary tale here. The revolutionaries won with lavish promises of freedom and “rule by the people.” Yet, there is no such thing as rule “by the people,” and there never has been. Any polity that is more complex than a tribal village ultimately ends up with the civil government in the hands of a relatively small elite.1
What usually happens is this: the state and most of its powers endure, but under new management. As the Italian sociologist Vilfredo Pareto put it: “The revolution at the end of the eighteenth century led merely to the bourgeoisie taking the place of the old elite.” Pareto further notes that in the wake of a revolution, the population discovers “they have merely exchanged yokes.”2
This will be the ultimate end game of every scheme hatched by those who imagine themselves to be anti-regime radicals, but who ultimately want nothing more than to keep the state fully in tact and use it to their own ends. And make no mistake, the power will be used to benefit the small new class of governing elites, at the expense of the ordinary taxpayers. Whatever rhetoric may be used about serving “the people” will be nothing more than window dressing designed to trick unsophisticated non-elites into supporting the new regime.
Whether from the Left or the Right, this type of centralist “revolutions” will provide no escape from the endless cycle of replacing one set of elites with another, and which characterizes much of human history which is, Pareto writes, “a graveyard of aristocracies.” Again and again, we find that the “liberators” are doing little more than replacing the people’s current yoke with a slightly different one.
Consequently, the only hope in providing any truly limiting factors on state power will be the dismemberment of the state into smaller and weaker pieces. It will be necessary to check power with power through true decentralization. This is why the Soviet state never re-emerged under a new name with similar prerogatives. Thanks largely to the centrifugal forces of latent nationalism within the various republics of the Soviet Union, the new Russian elite that replaced the old Soviet elite was unable to maintain the “union.” The result has been greatly beneficial to many of the former Soviet republics—especially the Baltic states—and to the old states of the Warsaw Pact which were informally under the boot of the Soviet regime. In other words, the dismemberment of the Soviet State, through a variety of de jure and de facto secession movements, accomplished what would not have been through simply placing a new elite atop the Soviet state.
Similarly, the American revolution, which was primarily a movement to secede from the British state, created a highly decentralized new “state” which possessed few of the powers of the old regime.3
We can conclude that any American who actually values human freedom—and its necessary antecedent, the weakening of the central state—will desire a similar dismemberment of the United States. After all, as the French revolution showed us, it is not enough to simply transfer the regime from the hands of one elite to another. Rather, radical decentralization, via secession and other means, will have to take place in order to create new power centers and new elites that can push back against the established elites and power centers of the rump state. Only when power is allowed to check power will there be any meaningful institutional limits on state power.
[Read More: “Only Power Can Check Power: Why We Need Decentralization“]
Yet, for the foreseeable future, we are likely to hear over and over again that the only acceptable “strategy” is to embrace elections and party politics. This is the “vote harder” argument. The usual “reformers” prefer this because voting, from the perspective of the regime, is harmless and quite ineffective in mounting any sort of meaningful opposition to the core powers and institutions of the state and its elites. Moreover, even in the highly unlikely event that elections were able to bring about any significant replacement of the current elite, this would only leave the current centralized state and its institutions intact, with only a change in those who control the means of exploitation.
- 1
It should be noted that not all civil governments are states, and so not all governing elites rule via states monopoly and coercion. In western Europe, states largely did not development until the early modern period. Yet, elites naturally existed before this time, and in the absence of a state apparatus. Even in a private or non-state polity, elites will emerge because they are the most skilled at managing resources and organizing institutions necessary for governance.
- 2
Vilfred Pareto, Sociological Writings, S.E. Finer (ed.),(New York: Praeger, 1966.)p. 156.
- 3
This was the state of affairs following the Treaty of Paris in 1783. Unfortunately, American counterrevolutionaries in the late 1780s worked to centralize the sovereign member states of the US under a new, consolidated national government. See Murray N. Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty (Auburn, AL: Mises Institute, 1999), volume four.
