It’s fitting that a political movement whose slogan is the backward looking “Make America Great Again” — and whose tribune, Donald Trump, appears to live in an eternal 1990 of his own mind — is waging war on the American future.
This war has four theaters of conflict. In the first, Trump is waging war on constitutional government, with a full spectrum attack on the idea of the United States as a nation of laws and not men. He hopes to make it a government of one man: himself, unbound by anything other than his singular will. Should the president win his campaign against self-government, future Americans won’t be citizens of a republic as much as subjects of a personalist autocracy.
In the second theater of conflict, the MAGA movement is waging war on the nation’s economic future, rejecting two generations of integration and interdependency with the rest of the world in favor of American autarky, of effectively closing our borders to goods and people from around the world so that the United States might make itself into an impenetrable fortress — a garrison state with the power to dictate the terms of the global order, especially in its own hemisphere. In this new world, Americans will abandon service sector work in favor of manufacturing and heavy industry.
“This is the new model,” the secretary of commerce, Howard Lutnick, said in an interview with CNBC last month, “where you work in these kind of plants for the rest of your life, and your kids work here, and your grandkids work here.” The reality is that this particular campaign — this effort to de-skill the working population of the United States — is more likely to immiserate the country and impoverish its residents than it is to inaugurate a golden age of prosperity.
Not content to leave Americans without a meaningful democratic future or one of broad economic prosperity, the White House is also fighting a pitched battle against a sustainable climate future.
In the same way that Trump and his allies have rejected the obligation to pass the nation’s tradition of self-governance on to the next generation, they have also rejected the obligation to pass a living planet on to those who will inherit the earth. Theirs, instead, is an agenda of unlimited resource extraction, with little regard for the consequences. Upon taking office, the president issued an executive order directing federal agencies to allow drilling in formerly protected areas. This, despite the fact that American energy production is at an all-time high — and the United States is now a net exporter of oil and gas.
Trump is aiming to open national forests to logging and has issued an executive order that would expedite efforts to engage in deep-sea mining, despite the risks it poses to critical ecosystems. He is also openly hostile to renewable energy, despite its growing efficiency and declining cost. (Recall that during the campaign, Trump promised to act in the direct interests of oil producers, telling them outright that he would approve their projects and expand drilling, provided they funded his presidential effort to the tune of $1 billion.)
The White House wants to wipe out a large part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — slashing its budget by a quarter and shuttering programs in climate research — as well as obliterate a third of the budget of U.S. Geological Survey, an agency whose work is vital, notes Science magazine, “to efforts such as monitoring water quality, protecting endangered species, and predicting landscape impacts from climate change.”
The fourth and final theater of the MAGA movement’s war on the future is adjacent to the third one: an assault on the nation’s capacity to produce scientific, technological and medical breakthroughs.
Whether under the guise of ending diversity efforts, disciplining institutions of higher education or commandeering the federal administrative state for the president’s corrupt purposes, the White House has taken a buzz saw to billions of dollars in federal grants for research in medicine and the hard sciences. In the first three months of the year, according to a minority report of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee, the Trump administration cut $2.7 billion from the National Institutes of Health, including funds for biomedical research and experimental cancer treatments.
The Trump administration also seeks to slash the National Science Foundation by more than half, pushing a $4.7 billion cut in its preliminary budget request. Trump’s N.S.F. administrators have also already paused or terminated hundreds of grants, according to the science journal Nature. In addition, the White House wants to cut spending in the Department of Energy’s research wing — the nation’s single largest funder of the physical sciences, which supports efforts to translate basic research into new technologies and applications — and seeks to defund or eliminate global disease monitoring and health-tracking systems at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
This is the wanton, pointless destruction of a MAGA cultural revolution. It serves no obvious purpose other than to “shrink” the government in the most arbitrary and capricious way imaginable. The federal government is the leading source of funding for science and technology research in the United States. How does one make America great again by destroying its capacity to develop advanced technology? Who prospers when we rob our scientists of the resources necessary to make breakthroughs that could transform our society for the better?
Even the most venal and shortsighted billionaire captains of industry should recognize how much their fortunes and influence rest on the work of countless researchers whose efforts often yield results that pay dividends for years. We can’t know, for certain, what technologies and treatments Americans will miss out on because the Trump administration either decided it was too expensive to maintain the American science establishment or thought that science was too liberal, too “woke.” But there’s no doubt that we’ll be worse off. And this is to say nothing of the potential brain drain of scientists who will leave this country for greener pastures, or those from abroad who will choose to remain in their home countries, where they live under governments that are at least a little less eager to give themselves lobotomies.
One war, four fronts. The aim, whether stated explicitly or not, is to erase the future as Americans have understood it and as they may have anticipated it.
In service of what, exactly? What vision does the MAGA movement have instead?
Here, an interesting debate has unfolded.
Writing in The Guardian, Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor argue that there’s no real vision at all. Instead, they write, “The governing ideology of the far right in our age of escalating disasters has become a monstrous, supremacist survivalism.” This is an “end times fascism” that is both taking advantage of social and environmental catastrophes and “simultaneously provoking and planning for them.” As for the ordinary people who form the base of the MAGA movement and its associated political tendencies, “End times fascism offers the promise of many more affordable arks and bunkers, these ones well within reach for lower-level foot soldiers.”
It is, Klein and Taylor write, a national bunker mentality — a way of being defined by plunder to prepare for the long night ahead and exclusion of those who don’t truly belong to the national community.
Responding in his Substack newsletter, Adam Tooze says, in effect, not so fast. Trump and his allies do have a vision of the future, albeit a retro one of self-sacrifice leading to new prosperity, brought on by the president’s “Liberation Day” tariffs. It is, Tooze writes, “a direct challenge to prevailing norms of American consumerism in the name of a better future.”
Commenting on Klein, Taylor and Tooze, John Ganz — author of “When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s” (and with whom I co-host a podcast) — makes a useful intervention, invoking the historian Jeffrey Herf’s notion of “reactionary modernism” to show how the MAGA movement is a “peculiar and perverse synthesis” of backward-facing nihilism and resentment and future-oriented utopianism. With Trumpism, Ganz writes, “there is the idea of production, national expansion, growth, development, but combined with a sharp restriction and rollback of who gets to share in the political and social bounties of citizenship.”
Trump and his allies are fighting a war on the future and in particular on the idea that our technological progress should proceed hand in hand with social and ethical progress — on the liberal universalism that demands an expansive and expanding area of concern for the state and society. And they are fighting a war for the future insofar as this means the narrowing of our moral horizons for the sake of unleashing certain energies tied to hierarchies of race, gender and sexuality.
As Ganz observes, the Trumpist vision of the future is obsessed with heavy industry and defense-oriented technological development. It rejects “‘feminized’ service-sector capitalism,” Ganz writes, as well as a concern with climate change that “seems feminine.” And it is not for nothing, as Tooze notes, that when Trump speaks of sacrifice for his tariffs, he zeros in on “dolls” and “washing machines,” objects associated with girls, women and domestic labor.
This is the future that the MAGA movement has in mind, as revealed by its actions in power so far. It is a future in which the United States abandons its Enlightenment heritage and liberal aspirations in favor of a closed society made up of supposedly native people — recall JD Vance’s paean to the soil of eastern Kentucky in his speech accepting the vice-presidential nomination last year — and rooted in notions of dominance and zero-sum competition.
I find this account of Trumpism as a reactionary futurist movement persuasive. Earlier this year, I wrote about Trump’s lack of future orientation with regard to the Constitution, a document written and ratified with posterity in mind. In fact, Americans have been preoccupied with the idea that their republic is a steward of sorts for self-government. You see it in the words of Thomas Jefferson, of Abraham Lincoln, of Franklin Roosevelt and of many other figures in the American political tradition.
Trump may reject this particular future orientation, but that doesn’t mean he lacks one. It does mean that his runs counter to what we expect to hear from an American political leader, especially one who occupies the Oval Office.
For those opposed to it, it is tempting to say that MAGA’s vision of the future is so unappealing — so profoundly unattractive — that most people will reject it. But Trump’s political longevity and success, even if it doesn’t translate to a full-throated endorsement of his entire movement, makes clear that this is naïve.
There are no guarantees that the public won’t embrace Trump’s future, all the more so because there does not appear to be much of an alternative to his vision of closed borders and closed societies. There are few people with the reach to contest the president — and even fewer in the putative opposition — who have tried to speak to something more than simple maintenance of the status quo, or who have tried to represent the aspirations of ordinary people with a transformative vision of what the future could be for everyone, and not just a fortunate and select few.
We have, in this country, a powerful movement eager to summon an authoritarian future. What we need is a movement dedicated to an egalitarian one, to a future in which all Americans can live the lives they choose to make for themselves — a country that rejects walls and rigid hierarchies in favor of the democratic virtues and universalist ideals of this country’s best traditions.
We have names for this vision. Frederick Douglass called it the “composite nation.” W.E.B. Du Bois called it the “abolition democracy,” and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of a “beloved community.”
With these materials, we can imagine a better future and contest the dark dreams of those in power. And if our political leaders are too timid to embark on that task — too afraid of backlash to think beyond the familiar — then we, as citizens still and not yet subjects, have an obligation to do so.
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Jamelle Bouie became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2019. Before that he was the chief political correspondent for Slate magazine. He is based in Charlottesville, Va., and Washington. @jbouie
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