Vladimir Putin will probably spend much of this Friday’s meeting with Donald Trump in Alaska distracting America’s megalomaniac by appealing to his vanity — congratulations on taking over the Kennedy Center! One aspect of the new America will definitely intrigue Putin. How is it that in the most advanced capitalist economy in the world, where a hyper-critical counterculture is the dominant rhythm of everyday life, Trump is managing to put in place the sunniness once enforced by the Soviet regime?
It is more than passing strange. In the Soviet era, so-called socialist realism was enforced in the fine arts, which depicted happy collective farmfolk; academics portrayed the Russian Revolution in lectures and books as the dawn of the world’s first workers’ paradise. The media published one glowing economic report after another; posters depicting radiant construction workers hung everywhere; new composers vied to embed heroic anthems to communism in their symphonies. A few lines critical of Stalin in a poem by Osip Mandelstam that Mandelstam read to a small group of friends resulted in a betrayal, the poet’s arrest and his death in a gulag. “Only in Russia is poetry respected,” Mandelstam had once wryly written. “It gets people killed.”
A drab, Philistine approach to culture is essential to a repressive regime, and for the Philistine Trump and his band of intellectual and cultural mediocrities, attempts to coerce American institutions into an optimistic sameness blend seamlessly with the coarseness of their taste. From universities to the Smithsonian, Trump wants an official American culture that projects only the “greatness” of America, with no flaws or blemishes. He dismisses reporters who criticise him as “scum” or “evil”. He has made it clear that, from government agencies to private banks like Goldman Sachs, he desires economic statistics that report only positive news. Like a dime-store Lenin, his giant portrait now hangs in front of the Department of Agriculture building in Washington.
The official optimism of the Soviet era was the result of a complex ideology that sought to engineer a desired future by reconfiguring the past and lying about the present. Yet Trump’s coercive sunniness has nothing to do with an ideology born from historical conflict and oppression. It is the bright, blinding bluster of a businessman, delivered in the ominous tones of a demagogue. It puts you in mind of the recent trend of “creative” television commercials for insurance companies. They almost always follow the same model: they (other insurance companies) fail in this or that comical way; we give it to you straight, and honest, and effective. The Ur-commercial or advertisement has always depended, whether explicitly or implicitly, on planting in the viewer or reader’s mind the inadequacy and inferiority of the competition.
So when Trump, in a move that might have warmed the heart of Putin, the ex-KGB man, recently fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics in order to replace her with someone more likely to, in classic Soviet fashion, disseminate statistics favourable to the regime, he wasn’t acting like some modern-day Lenin. Lenin used the concept of “production propaganda” to heroicise workers and exaggerate both the success of Soviet industrialisation and its revolutionary effects. That was the product of theory, rooted in history. Trump is marketing reactionary politics as though he were selling a car. As H.G. Wells put it in Tono-Bungay, his visionary novel about the role of commercially created perception in modern society: “the struggle for life takes the form of competitive advertisement and the effort to fill your neighbour’s eye.” Trump is, day after day, filling the American eye.
“Trump is marketing reactionary politics as though he were selling a car.”
Trump’s reflex to send the American military into American cities, most recently into Washington D.C., coupled with his expansion of ICE’s deportation and detention activities, should be seen in this light. It is chilling, of course. It is, without doubt, an autocratic spasm, the likes of which are making ordinary Americans from every walk of life careful about what they say or write. But because Trump’s use of the military is rooted in a competitive attempt to manipulate mass feeling, and not in some iron idea or ideology, it comes across as a weird combination of Soviet-style repression and American mercantile ingenuity. “An intellectual hatred is the worst,” wrote W. B. Yeats. But Trump’s crude initiatives are, at bottom, pitches to commercial feeling: Look at their decaying, crime-ridden cities. Now look at our safe and shiny ones. Where would you rather put your money — and your vote?
I don’t mean to make light of what Trump is doing. He is destroying the fabric of American creativity and freedom — they are the same thing — in everything he does. Like a lot of people who define themselves by the money they accumulate, Trump seems mortally offended by qualities that are non-transactional and non-quantitative. More than one avid and earnest young person, speaking their heart out in an uninhibited moment, has looked up to see someone staring at them with daggers in the eyes, riven by envy of their inner freedom. It’s why Iago hates Othello. It’s why John Claggart hates Billy Budd in Herman Melville’s great story of the unfathomable, implacable hatred harboured by coarseness of fineness. It’s why Iago-Trump hates Obama-Othello beyond all reason or explanation.
It is no wonder, then, that Trump is pushing a government initiative to pour nearly $100 billion private dollars into AI. That is how business replaces independent thought — how Claggart replaces Billy. The official sunny culture of the Soviet regime sought to replace independent thought with a kind of production-propaganda AI. Its algorithm of an inexorable march to utopia did the thinking for its citizens. In America, an AI washed and rinsed of all original insight, which is born out of original experience, is now doing the thinking — quantitatively, aggregately — for American citizens. America is not on the verge of totalitarianism. It is in the throes of businesstarianism.
It would not be prudent to take with a grain of salt Trump sending the military into Washington to keep order as if the city were in flames. But it would be paralysing to see it as an irreversible step toward authoritarianism. Rather it is Trump gussying up his Right-wing showroom in advance of the 2026 fall retail season — I mean, the midterm elections. They want the police to be engaged in “brokering and enforcing social cooperation”, in the words of Brandon del Pozo, a Rawlsian former chief of police and now assistant professor of public health at Brown University. We just want to put the bad guys in jail, where they can’t hurt you. You get a lot more miles per gallon with us.
It is not quite what Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini or any modern dictator pursuing the merciless logic of an historical equation had in mind. This American moment is the product of democracy’s meltdown, not of a rival political system to democracy. The old distinction between negative liberty (the state limits itself to protecting rights and ensuring safety) and positive liberty (the state helps individuals realise their potential) has broken down. The social justice movement, well meaning as it is, has been indulging its own autocratic spasm in almost entirely drowning out negative with positive liberty. In a society where people are going to “realise their potential” — i.e. get what they want, any way they can — a state that helps certain groups but not others to achieve that goal is going to be perceived as an oppression to everyone else. In a super-mega-hyper competitive society like America, social justice is seen by many as just another way for someone to get a leg up.
And in an American society where the idea of community never extended beyond where you lived, where religion has receded even where its rituals are observed, where the screen both causes and sanctions increasingly anti-social, or even incomprehensible, behaviour, a lot of people respond to news of the military on American pop streets with shouts of “It’s about time!” As for Trump’s custom Italian-made heel on the neck of universities, the media, low and high culture, plenty of people don’t perceive it so much in its particulars as revel in its aggregate. Finally, they say, at a time when democratic freedoms have, in so many ways, tipped over into the type of freedom that alarms and threatens rather than inspires and transports, here is someone — true, a sociopathic and vindictive clown, but hey, he’s our sociopath — addressing the problem.
For these people, Make America Great Again means make America simple and safe again. On some fundamental level, that is a non-partisan desire. After all, echt-liberal democrat Kathy Hochul, governor of New York, also sent the National Guard into New York, specifically its subways. On Friday, Putin won’t be interested in negotiating about Ukraine; he only cares about what he wants. What he might wish to talk about, but wouldn’t dare to, is how Trump is bringing back Soviet-style conformism, but in Russia’s great rival, and combined with a spirit of American entrepreneurial chaos and greed.
