It doesn’t really matter much that Donald Trump is an observable psychopath who holds democratic conventions in contempt and has a business model that revolves around borrowing billions, harvesting government contracts, and avoiding paying tax.
It doesn’t matter that he arranged a near coup that went within a hair’s breadth of overthrowing US democracy when he last departed office.
It doesn’t really matter that his administration was a series of revolving doors of nutters and kooks going into and out of the corridors of power, making up incoherent policy on the run, from nothing but the whim of the Commander in Chief.
The only thing that matters is that he disrupts.
Trump is the defining alienating, incoherent hypocrite of an alienating, incoherent, and hypocritical age. If he is a psychopath, he is merely first amongst equals of an age that has increasingly tried to make us all psychopaths. He is just a bigger one than us.
He has substance simply because the well-ordered narrative of more than a generation has lost traction on the thinking and feeling of, or the narrative as experienced by, the people in the suburbs. We don’t want to be as the Age would have us, and we increasingly have issues with the Age and its outcomes.
That is why the disruption Trump brings, no matter how painful it is, is welcomed by those who vote for him, and more.
Those who fear and loathe him know that the disruption he is, is the embodiment of the limitations of the Age. Of their Age. They are repelled by him because they know he is their creation and he wants nothing other than to be loved by the Age that did the creating.
All Trump wants is to play golf with them and show them his beautiful house and beautiful wife. All he wants is validation in the form of respect for his thoughts and opinions and thanks for his generosity.
All he wants is for the world to look the other way at his wealth creation, as it has at theirs.
No matter how desperately the Neoliberal narrative that was planted over the post-Keynesian failure of the 1970s tries, it finds neither the belief nor rationale to sustain itself. It grew, it flowered, and had its summer. But it isn’t eternal.
Around the world, it is spending the future to maintain a gilded present for the few. It has signed us up for some very expensive wars. And the spectres of mortality keep insinuating themselves into our present with an irritating insistence.
Donald is the pussy groping angel of death, for an Age birthed in Ronald Reagan’s or Margaret Thatcher’s homilies about individual responsibility and governments in the way.
That he bears virtually no responsibility for anything and has essentially been underpinned by government funding all the way simply puts his credibility into more observable relief.
There is almost an element of philosophical genius in his almost total absence of philosophy and his wearing of a badge of conservatism, as well as his rendering of religion as just another designer political label.
Within an Age that exhorted one thing for the many while another thing was done by the few who became inordinately rich, the Donald Trump story reshapes credulity. He is Neoliberalism’s Frankenstein.
If the United States is the paramount democracy of the age, then Trump is the paramount hypocrite who would never have been possible without the hypocrisy of that Age.
And even as the sun sets on the Age the whole idea that the grandees of that democracy could think to run a plausibly senile candidate is definitively contemptuous. Donald would experience that as love, paving the way to a triumphant re-entry into the most powerful abode in the world.
If it isn’t love as the rest of us know it, why should Donald care? He, as we have all been cultivated, thinks only of himself and those closest to him, and then only in terms of outcomes for him.
If an Age tells us we love Neoliberalism because we have more and ignores the contradictions, is it not equally love to give back to that Age someone who has more and ignores his contradictions?
Such is the world in which the Americans now find themselves. They will, it currently appears, return the love of the Age.
But it isn’t just the Americans. That Age which lifted billions of Chinese out of poverty and added the concept of trillions to global GDP, defeated the evil Soviets as well as inflation, placed mobile devices in everyone’s hands, and euthanized print media, washed across the world.
If Neoliberalism left bequests, it also harboured some disturbing secrets. The debt and the end of privacy. The precariat and the bullshit jobs. Did it look the other way at despots and dictators who we thought might be on ‘our’ side?
It also posed questions. Weapons of mass destruction? Covid Stimulus? Trickle down economics? Industry self-regulation? Is discrimination ended or redirected?
From there, as Neoliberalism ceased to create economic wealth, it domesticated forms of progressivism to its yoke, leading to more unmentionable and unknowable issues.
These became a human shield to ensure the economic dividend of the Age was never questioned.
Just who is racist or sexist and why? What is the gender pay gap again? What actually is discrimination and when is it good and when is it not so good, and why? What were the origins of Covid and how did it spread, and why were so many of us home? What percentage of men are toxic, and can women be toxic? Why are we taking so many immigrants? Why is education costing so much? Have our homes, our jobs, our emissions, and our data been financialised? Where have income increases gone?
Those questions aren’t just American; they are now global, and this is why the returning Donald has resonance far beyond the United States.
Some of issues he has picked up – the jobs, the unspoken rights and wrongs, the funding for wars, for starters – they are being asked around the world, and certainly in the developed world of polities, which have long ceased to provide answers.
Most of all, the simple question of real income growth across the developed world and beyond is counterpoised against the wealth of the 1%. What happened there?
The Age has been the champion of taxation reduction, corporatised government services, contractualised employment, and lighter regulation.
Around almost all of the developed world, and with the major global organisations insistently pushing much the same agenda on the developing world: fundamental social services have been sold off from public books and privatised to provide revenue streams for large capital.
The power, the water, the public transport, and the schools. People aren’t people any more, between whom there are shared human bonds.
They are revenue streams, signatories to the creation of loans, and then money itself. They are service-level agreements and mortgagors.
They are data-generating cookies and advertising segments. They are contractual obligations, court litigants, carers and claimants. Sex became commoditised, perceptibly in the name of profit maximisation. Even the ends of life for our loved parents and grandparents all too often beg the questions of house sales, bonds and age care facilities as a prelude to claims on estates.
If one looks around that world, one sees plenty of discontent, and the same issues come to the surface over and over again. France, Germany, the UK, Ireland, Scotland, Canada, Japan and South Korea, bubbling to the surface in the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, and on.
Housing, services, immigration, costs of living, and the tax avoidance of the wealthy combined with their financialisation of tax systems, social service provision, and notably education. Almost everywhere one looks.
And very large numbers of people around the world think this is bullshit, while at the same time assuming that their political processes have been gamed by the capital elite and their managerial captains.
The major issue of the Age is one the world largely assumes is lost already. We have already pumped enough carbon into the air to affect the global climate. The affluent taking up the profit-producing contracts for engineering and protecting our warmed futures are the scions of those who received profits from the mass production and use of internal combustion engines, consumerism, corporate agriculture and chemicals, the infrastructure and concrete, as well as the financialisation of our lives.
We know the lives we lead are killing the planet, but we cant stop living the lives we lead because to do so is to fail our children, meaning the best that we can hope for is the freedom from being childless for those children to whom we owe opportunity.
To go with all of that, the tepid enthusiasm of politicians everywhere is the standout achievement of the Age. Not just politicians but magnates, business leaders academics and even senior clergy, to go with bureaucrats and their political masters.
For the most part, they are despised, seen as the psychopaths they all too often are. In a small minority of instances they retain respect, maybe a reminder of a past where eminent people were seen to have integrity, and held to that even when they failed in public life.
The current contemporaries are what? Overpaid, over entitled bare-faced liars purveying glib speciousness and casuistry?
Those who would tell us what is best for our futures having monumentally rogered our presents? Are they the executives in countless workplaces around the world who assert dismissive disrespect and discrimination, freed from accountability and responsibility, while cloaking themselves in the progressive mores of the Age, as a permanent and daily reminder of the hypocrisy it embodies?
Neoliberalism’s Frankenstein wants love from these people who manifestly could not care one iota about us and thoroughly despise him.
Although Donald Trump will go no closer to addressing most of the issues blighting lives in either the United States or around the world, he is using us to gain traction with them and is likely to both fragment our toxic polity and redirect it towards regaining traction with us as a means to ensure its own survival.
That will make us an object for contest for affection and maybe tangible benefit, rather than the smug condescension and post coital ennui, of the Age.
Buckle up and brace, for it will be painful, risk laden and chaotic. There is little indication Neoliberalism’s Frankenstein will do anything to benefit anyone but himself during another US Presidential term.
We can be sure he will bring pain and suffering, just as we can be 100% certain he will lie to us, be 100% incoherent in his reasoning, and no doubt make us all hypocrites to be at one with him in the decisions he will make.
Trump will for sure offer blandishments and bribes to secure the love of the neoliberal consensus that has birthed him. But we can be sure he will shake the Toxic politics that Neoliberalism has bequeathed.
And in the ensuing carnage and chaos, the best we can do is hope that somewhere beyond the carnage will be peace and light, enabling greater humanity for those surviving the journey.
Neoliberalism’s Frankenstein will be an affront to human decency, but the toxic polity has cashed it in for a generation.
Donald Trump wont embody or return decency, but he will smash the idea that the least worst alternative actually has anything better for us.
If that happens in the United States, it may catch on elsewhere. And if that is the price we have to pay then maybe the time has come.