Hyperfascist dreams on a screen near you
By 
Here are some thought-provoking pieces I ran into today, that in their different ways suggest reasons for optimism that we can awake from the Trumpian fascist nightmare in the foreseeable future, but also suggest the tremendous amount of damage that is happening and will happen between now and then.
First, Seva Gunitsky:
The central technology of autocratic rule is not repression but administration. Four recent articles on modern autocracy, all very different in their approaches, converge on this claim. Purges, coups, and dramatic confrontations are the exceptions and often symptoms of failure. Much more time and effort is spent on the administrative minutia of who gets reshuffled where, which specific policies the legislature is allowed to bicker about, and how party branches get embedded inside private firms.
Together these articles suggest something the field of comparative politics has been slow to absorb: what keeps autocrats in power is often not the dramatic violent stuff but the boring, nonviolent work of managing and moving people. The most durable form of authoritarianism is probably one that co-opts instead of coerces and allows limited dissent instead of suppressing it outright. One of the papers finds, for example, that consistently firing your subordinates triples your probability of losing power while reshuffling them lowers it by two-thirds.
If that’s true, the most resilient autocracies are those that look the most “normal”, with somewhat functioning bureaucracies, legislatures where people sometimes argue, and cabinets with ministers rotating in a way that, if I take my glasses off, kind of resembles the churn of democratic governance.
But autocratic management also has limits, and every article here documents the same tradeoff: control versus capacity. The more tightly the regime grips the administrative apparatus, the less it can do.
This tradeoff cannot be resolved, and applies beyond the autocracies examined in these articles. Trump, for example, is by training and instinct a dismissal leader. “You’re fired” became an early catchphrase for a reason. The cases examined here suggest such regimes don’t put down institutional roots, and quickly decline. The bad news is they do a lot of damage on the way down.
Ned Resnikoff riffs off Gunitsky’s analysis to suggest that Trump and Trumpism represent what he calls “hyperfascism.”
I would like to suggest that Trumpism is best understood as a species of what I’m going to call hyperfascism. By “hyperfascism,” I don’t mean “superfascism” or anything like that. Instead, I’m using the hyper- prefix in a way similar to how Baudrillard deploys it in his definition of hyperreality as a sort of representation that is more “real” than whatever it was originally meant to represent. (He uses Disneyland as an example of the paradigmatic hyperreal space.) I’m also influenced by Anton Jäger’s suggestion that “hyperpolitics”—or constant and frenetic political activity in the absence of any structures that might convert this activity into real institutional change—is the dominant political register in 21st-century Western democracies.
So what is hyperfascism? It is hyperreal, hyperpolitical fascism. It’s a dramatic reenactment of totalitarian domination in a time and place where the infrastructure for real totalitarianism is nowhere to be found. It’s the signs and symbols of fascism detached from the machinery of the Nazi war economy or the large-scale, organized street violence of the Italian blackshirts.
Make no mistake: hyperfascism is still fascism. But it is a shallow sort of fascism, obsessed with outward appearances and completely uninterested in everything else. It is as if the architects of the Trump regime had cribbed their entire governing agenda from cheap cyberpunk thrillers about fascist dystopias. They certainly haven’t given much thought to how authoritarian regimes consolidate popular consent; in fact, they’re acting like the 2024 election represented the end of politics, and therefore the end of any need on their part to modulate their behavior in order to ensure regime stability.
This helps to explain the key difference between the Trump regime and the more successful, long-running authoritarian regimes that appear in Gunitsky’s literature review. As Gunitsky notes, “the most resilient autocracies are those that look the most ‘normal’, with somewhat functioning bureaucracies, legislatures where people sometimes argue, and cabinets with ministers rotating in a way that, if I take my glasses off, kind of resembles the churn of democratic governance.” Trump’s regime has a dysfunctional bureaucracy, tolerates no dissent, and is prone to erratic firings and staff purges. And it kicked off Trump’s second term by voluntarily plunging into the sort of fiascoes that typically signal profound regime weakness: violent confrontations with protestors, open and unpredictable campaigns of terror, and needless provocations against other countries. Why? Well, one possible explanation is that violent purges and jackbooted pogroms are the sort of thing that fascist bad guys do in movies and TV.
That is why I say Trump is practicing a form of hyperreal fascism; its models are less prior fascist regimes than lurid media representations of those regimes. If you think I’m being a little glib when I say that Trump’s acolytes are self-consciously imitating pop culture supervillains, don’t take my word for it. Government departments now regularly post winking references to cinematic monsters like American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman, to say nothing of outright Nazi iconography. Everything else—the threats to invade Greenland, the concentration camps for undocumented immigrants, the invasion of Minneapolis—exists on the same continuum. It’s all part of the show.
The nod to Baudrillard — I would also mention Neil Postman’s prophetic analysis more than 40 years ago now in Amusing Ourselves to Death — captures well the peculiar shallowness and unreality of the Trumpian show, which in the end is all the endless mendacity and meretriciousness of so-called reality TV yoked to the violence of the state.
In a related vein, Paul Krugman argues that Trump’s regime is failing fast, and in a particularly destructive and chaotic way:
Donald Trump will never admit that his gratuitous Iran war has been a total disaster. But the debacle has clearly broken him. So we are now saddled with a president who has given up governing, but will maintain his grip on power wherever he can. And his power will be exclusively focused on rage and revenge.
Hence Trump has appointed Bill Pulte as the acting Director of National Intelligence (DNI), a position critical to national security.
The word “acting” is crucial. The statute creating the position of DNI explicitly requires that the appointee “shall have extensive national security expertise.” Pulte, the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, has no background in anything related to national security. So Trump is trying to bypass a Congressional confirmation process that would put Pulte under the spotlight. Even Republicans might shed their slavish obedience at this point, given Trump’s plummeting poll numbers and his betrayal of John Cornyn.
There are some rumblings that Pulte, like the $1.8 billion slush fund, may be a bridge too far for the tiny but crucial handful of rebellious GOP members of Congress who have unexpectedly begun to stumble onto their missing spines, only because, as in Cornyn’s case, they’ve made the shocking discovery that Donald Trump is a backstabbing traitorous piece of shit.
Pulte is a bumbling hatchet man: so far none of his attempted lynchings have succeeded. But for Trump, willingness to engage in unethical behavior is all that matters.
What will Pulte do as America’s senior intelligence official? You might think that even someone like Trump, who has no desire to serve the national interest, who sees wars only as ways to enrich himself and distract from his domestic woes, would want accurate intelligence. After all, if you’re going to wag the dog, you don’t want the dog to bite back the way it has in Iran.
But Trump appears to have given up on governing — even governing aimed at consolidating his own power and legacy. He wants to punish everyone he imagines has wronged him but has lost all interest in making the government work, even for nefarious purposes. So he don’t need no intelligence, just someone who will indulge his rage. And that will be Pulte’s job.
Just to be clear, I am by no means saying that Trump’s descent into rage-madness has ended the threat to U.S. democracy. The Koch-backed Federalist Society, which now controls the Supreme Court, is going all in on rigging U.S. elections with the goal of locking in permanent Republican rule. The architects of Project 2025 are marching ahead with their goal of turning the federal government into a spoils system that answers only to billionaires and their political pawns. Politicization of research funding is getting very close to destroying a scientific community that took generations to build.
But Trump himself is, at this point, little more than a festering ball of anger and hate.
We will see, but we may have ultimately caught a tremendous break because Donald Trump is very old, very lazy, very stupid, deeply impulsive and disorganized, and basically good at nothing other than grifting America’s bottomless strategic reserve of complete morons, while doing his ninth-rate fascism as standup schtick for the cameras.
Reminder that the LGM fundraiser ends on the third day, after which Loomis’s good humor will rise from the dead: