March 28, 2025

Trump’s Antisocial State: The administration is attempting to incapacitate the redistributive and social protective arms of the state, while exploiting its vast bureaucratic powers to silence, threaten, and deport. “The Heritage Foundation’s Mandate for Leadership: Project 2025 has produced a much more focused Trump than we saw the first time around. It has found a way to convert the president’s flare ups into a constant source of energy and to arrange his thought bubbles into a sequential narrative,” Melinda Cooper writes in DISSENT. The document and the administration’s action so far “represents the apotheosis of the antisocial state: a state form that has withdrawn from the task of social insurance and placed its entire administrative apparatus in the hands of a small group of uber-wealthy business partners.”

The Decline of the Rest: What comes after the end of the American-led world order? – “Democracy has been eroding for decades. In its latest report on the state of democracy, issued six weeks into the Trump administration but based on data through 2024, the V-Dem Institute in Sweden noted that there are fewer democracies than autocracies for the first time in more than 20 years. Almost three out of four people in the world live under autocratic governments, the highest share since 1978, well before the end of the Cold War. Liberal democracies host 12 percent of the world population.” Not a very nice prospect, but maybe what we have to deal with. Eduardo Porter writing in the WaPo

Where are the firebreaks? We should fight elections, in advance of as well as in 2026, and bolster courts and a defiant Federal Reserve, says Robert Kuttner in the Prospect, but “an aroused public could be the most important firebreak of all. One question that good organizers always ask of themselves is: What is our theory of change? In this case, what are the mechanisms that might slow down Trump and his wrecking crew, and how might they be activated? … one theory of change is to do a lot more local organizing. Joined by Bernie Sanders, AOC is emerging as the leader of a broad opposition. They need to mobilize an army of citizens as organizers, who in turn should work to organize everyone either appalled by Trump’s dictatorship or harmed by his policies. Organizers need to mobilize the vets, farmers, Social Security pensioners, people filing for unemployment insurance, and others who have lost vital public services, to pressure and embarrass other Republican elected officials, and organize still more citizens. That popular mobilization can also serve as a counterweight to Trump’s success in intimidating large institutions.” American Prospect via Portside.

Fascism Today: TrumpWorld Report of Dirty Deeds: DHS has cut support for a research database at UMCP that tracks and analyzes incidents of mass violence (school shootings, domestic terrorist events etc.) — and no wonder; according to WaPo “[Project Director Michael] Jensen said this cancellation comes at a time when their data revealed the first two months of 2025 saw a 25 percent increase in terrorism and targeted violence incidents compared to the first two months of last year.” No word on whether Tesla defacements are included.