Nearly 15 years ago, in the aftermath of the Great Recession, a much younger me plucked a slim paperback book from the shelves of a local book café. The book, titled Capitalist Realism, would turn out to be one of the seminal political works of the millennial Left, especially in the days following the end of the (now almost entirely forgotten) Occupy Wall Street protest movements.
Written by the British political philosopher Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism made a fairly simple and convincing argument: after the collapse of real socialism and the fall of the Berlin Wall, there no longer existed enough imagination inside the West to actually bring about meaningful political change. Evidence of that thesis was hardly in short supply back then, either: the bankers on Wall Street had just broken the economy, and the only “solution” on offer by president Barack Obama and his European counterparts was to bail the bankers out with taxpayer money so that they could go on doing whatever it is they had been doing. Nobody went to jail; the banks were “too big to fail”, and even Obama himself seemed to have no clue what to do about it. Some rules were put in place to try to prevent similar risky behavior in the future, rules that have either been or are in the process of being dismantled today. A more permanent fix was never in the making.
If anyone back then thought that the inability to come up with systemic fixes in America was simply down to the personal failings of Obama himself or the people around him, the Euro crisis that followed in the wake of the Great Recession would soon put such thoughts to bed. European politicians all faced the same conundrum of a structurally flawed economic and political system, and like the Americans, all they could think to do was to kick the can down the road. To fix the Euro would have required deep overhauls to the entire structure of the EU, and that was simply too much work. Instead, European politicians bailed out the bad banks and left the bad banking system in place, fully aware that in doing so they were simply guaranteeing even worse problems down the road.
All of that was part of the ethos back in the late 2000s and early 2010s; we had the perfect system, there was no other alternative, but the system was also breaking apart and nobody had any idea what to do about it. The horizon had closed, the debates were over, and we now lived at the end of history: that might have been an exhilarating thought to an older generation watching the Berlin Wall fall down and the Iron Curtain finally part, but to the millennials some 20 years later, it was nothing but stifling.
And it wasn’t just stifling to the Left, as it would turn out. Mark Fisher, waging a long-term battle against depression and other mental health issues, would end up dying by suicide in early 2017. In an ironic twist, his death came at precisely the moment in history that a dark horse candidate in the 2016 Republican primary — an erratic showman and real estate mogul by the name of Donald J. Trump — would upend the entire American political establishment precisely by saying all the things that nobody else would or could. The Iraq War was stupid; US globalist economic policy had destroyed the American working class and hollowed out the country; of course, he also talked about Mexico sending “rapists” and criminals as well, which only further polarised the debate.
The entire American political class of 2016 agreed: there was no alternative; the way we had been doing things was the only way to do them. Yet Trump, in an electoral coup that nobody believed was even possible, boldly stood up and called their bluff, and his voters absolutely loved him for it. The era of capitalist realism was over; rather than shirking from or cautioning against an active political imagination, Trump and those around him now invited people to dream, and to dream big. Less than 10 years after Fisher wrote Capitalist Realism, the book had been rendered obsolete: for the generation of young intellectuals on the Right who flocked to the banner of MAGA in 2017 and thereafter, the future promised nothing but freedom and opportunity.
Eight years into the Trump era, the ghost of TINA, “There Is No Alternative”, is if anything even more distant than it was in 2017. Americans today are invited to imagine pretty much anything: mass deportations of tens of millions of people, a no-holds-barred war against the administrative state, a wholesale effort to “Make America Healthy Again”, a total revolution in geopolitics, economic policy, and so on. We now speak of building cities on Mars, or abolishing income taxes entirely, or of boldly going back to the economic patterns and policies of the Fifties or, even, 1890s. Such scandalous dreams would have been utterly unthinkable during the dour Obama years, where a minor fix here and a minor nudge there — all overseen by properly vetted, apolitical “experts”, of course! — were hailed as the only practical mode of governance.
Having said all that, there is actually an obvious contradiction built right into the Trump era that replaced the capitalist realism that Mark Fisher criticised. If one looks at the past eight years — with power passing first from Obama to Trump, then from Trump to Biden, and then from Biden back to Trump — and looks underneath the hype and the rhetoric, the actual political story is one of subtle continuity. Rhetorically, Trump and Biden always agreed on one thing: that they were like night and day, completely opposed to each other, and the choice between them was the choice between two radically different sets of policies for America.
But this is simply not true if one actually looks at the evidence. Take the idea of tariffs: many would say they represent the most central feature of what makes Trump “different” from his predecessors. Yet in reality, tariff policy has been an area of remarkable political continuity since 2016; it is only in the world of political rhetoric that a conflict between two different, distinct “sides” actually exists.
To illustrate this, Trump originally broke from political consensus in his first term in order to slap tariffs on China, a policy move that Biden loudly ridiculed as idiotic and counterproductive. But when Biden replaced Trump in the Oval Office, he did not abolish Trump’s tariffs at all. Quite the opposite: he spent his entire administration furiously iterating and expanding upon them. Fast forwarding to 2025, and Trump’s shocking “liberation day” tariff announcements were at first greeted as a sui generis bit of policy; an idea so radical, far-reaching and/or stupid that it couldn’t have been dreamed up by anyone other than Trump. But in reality, Trump’s tariffs were themselves an iteration of earlier Biden policy. Biden’s White House had spent the years since the Ukraine war devising a new economic model where countries would be divided into friendly, neutral, and unfriendly “spheres”. The older, Clinton-era model saw economic globalism as both a means and an end unto itself; the more free trade there was, the better off America would be. Against this discredited model, Biden, as well as national security advisor Jake Sullivan, proposed tying trade access to America much more tightly to both national security concerns and to the economic health of America’s middle class.
The Biden attempt to fuse national security, geopolitical brinkmanship and re-industrialisation at home was then given practical shape in the various semiconductor tariffs and regulations that Biden launched during the second half of his term. Biden much preferred import and export controls over blunt tariffs, but the goal was clear: isolate China, and use the large economic heft of the United States to bring geopolitical allies into closer alignment.
To put it plainly, the tariff policies of the second Trump administration simply continued where Jake Sullivan left off. The goal was unchanged, but they now merged with Trump’s long-standing obsession with tariffs. Of course, rhetorically, neither side would ever admit to any overlap whatsoever, and partisans of Trump would say that his tariffs are all about bringing back blue collar manufacturing jobs. But that is clearly just an excuse, and an unconvincing one at that: Trump and his administration are constantly declaring that being on America’s side, or agreeing to geopolitical concessions, will be the only way to access the American market going forward. Moreover, the tariff rollout was never coordinated with American industry. Nor does there even seem to be anyone inside of American industry willing to defend them. Indeed, why should they? Once you declare that you can’t make a trade deal with Canada if they recognise Palestine, or that Brazil will have to eat massive tariffs unless the corruption charges against former president Jair Bolsonaro are dropped, you are no longer doing industrial policy; you are using tariffs as a tool of geopolitics, carving out “friendly” and “unfriendly” trade zones just as Sullivan and Biden had hoped to do more fully in their second term.
“The tariff policies of the second Trump administration simply continued where Jake Sullivan left off.”
The same criticism can be levied against the Ukraine war, and Trump’s strenuous declarations that this war is actually “Biden’s war”. In point of fact, the Ukraine conflict is the collaborative project of both Trump and Biden, with a minor assist from Barack Obama’s second term. While Obama’s state department famously supported the Maidan coup of 2014, Obama himself was an opponent of funnelling arms to Ukraine thereafter, reasoning that Ukraine was very far away from the US and very close to Russia. It was under Trump’s first term that the official buildup of Western weaponry inside Ukraine began, and when Biden assumed office, he simply continued where Trump had left off, furthering the project of building up Ukraine as a bulwark against Russia. Biden might have been the one to actually eat the cake of the Ukraine war, but it was Trump who warmed up the oven.
Of course, the same pattern is now repeating itself yet again: the drawdown in arms deliveries to Ukraine that Trump is now bragging about actually started under Biden, simply because the US was running out of more weapons to send. Conversely, the strategy of trying to strangle Russia, or at least force it into a peace settlement through the application of tariffs that Biden devised, has not been abandoned by Trump. Instead, it has been scaled up to levels that Biden himself was unwilling to contemplate. Biden considered secondary tariffs on India to be far too geopolitically reckless — India being an important potential ally in any future showdown against China — and so it took Trump, the supposed “anti-war” candidate, to implement the policy that the “warmonger” Biden wouldn’t sign off on. Indeed, the joining of China, India and Russia together into a loose alliance against American bullying is a geopolitical disaster of the first order. None other than Biden’s national security advisor, Jake Sullivan himself, has recently been seen in Indian media bemoaning Trump’s destruction of America’s diplomatic standing. Similarly, after spending the entirety of Biden’s term attacking him for being far too aggressive and quick to use military force, Trump has now authorised more military strikes in the first year of his presidency than Biden did in his entire four-year term; has massively ramped up the war against Yemen (only to then surrender in the face of growing ammo deficits) and now banging the war drum against Venezuela.
Trump promised “mass deportations”, but in his first month, the number of deportations wasn’t even up to the level of Joe Biden and is no better than Obama’s. Trump promised to fix the deficit, only to then immediately return to business as usual. Trump promised an end to DEI policies, but has arguably acted to expand the bureaucratic and NGO apparatus he inherited from his “woke” predecessors; all that Trump has changed is that this apparatus is now focused on very intrusively policing antisemitism and/or criticism of Israel.
The above list might naturally appear as just another partisan litany of complaints aimed against the sitting president. But none of this is actually meant to be a criticism of Donald Trump. Logically, if there’s no difference between Trump and Biden, or between Biden and Trump, then both candidates have failed to do what they promised their voters. Biden told the Democrats that a vote for him would be a step away from Trump’s fascist mania; Trump boasted that once he became President again, the woke insanity and globalist policies of Biden would be things of the past. In the days of Obama and Mark Fisher’s capitalist realism, the problem was that there was only one door, one alternative, one way to do things. Now, there are a million different doors, each one more fantastical and colourful than the last, yet somehow they all lead to the same place in the end. The depression Fisher pointed to is gone, now replaced by white-hot anger, yet the policies still do not change. How much of an improvement is this really?
Indeed, at the time of writing this, rumours are now swirling of yet another direct continuation between Joe Biden and Donald Trump: that of failing health, and underhanded attempts to cover that situation up. Trump, just like Biden, has been dogged by an increasing number of minor health issues: swollen ankles, visible bruising on his hands, the occasional moment caught on camera of dragging one leg or seemingly having trouble walking straight. Taken on their own, they amount to very little, but they have been the topic of an increasing amount of gossip as of late. After being missing in action for three days for undisclosed reasons — leading to a rapid acceleration of the rumours around his health — Trump was pictured golfing.
What is so telling about this tide of rumours about Trump’s health has very little to do with whether Trump is or was genuinely sick or not. Rather, it is the sense that even here, nothing in politics actually seems to change between the parties. The shameful and genuinely destructive coverup of Biden’s failing health was attacked viciously (and for very good reason!) by Trump and the Republican party; yet it seems like a foregone conclusion that most or all who did so would be ready to close ranks and defend their guy doing the same thing. If Joe Biden did it, why can’t we?
Far from standing on any principles, or being concerned with real, material change, the political battle inside America — and to a great extent the rest of the West as well — has become unfathomably bitter at the same time as it has become increasingly imaginary. Trump’s supporters may just be ready to fight just as viciously on behalf of a medical coverup as they once fought against it, and if one looks at the Epstein affair, the MAGA movement has shown an ability to perform impressive heel turns: from considering the release of the Epstein files a huge priority to bemoaning it as a “democrat hoax”. Regime change wars might have been what led America down its current downward spiral; but after a decade of railing against those wars, Trump’s defense secretary now refuses to rule out another one against Venezuela. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Where partisanship is concerned, reality no longer seems to matter much. As the amount of people employed in American manufacturing continues to fall — US manufacturing has now actually been contracting for six months straight! — the White House’s official X account is putting out AI-generated pictures of blonde, rugged construction workers, boasting about the ongoing “blue collar boom!”. Supporters of Trump cheer this wholly imaginary boom; opponents point to the real-world numbers only to be quickly shouted down. Of course, the day the shoe ends up on the other foot, it will be Republicans’ turn to talk about real world numbers, and the Democrats’ turn to shout them down. Inside the imaginations of both sides, a great war is being fought for the future of the country, with stakes that have never been higher. Outside of that imaginary battle, the empire haltingly plods along like it always has, seemingly powerless to reform or change course. Far from being a product of Trump or Biden’s personal flaws, this state of affairs seems unlikely to change no matter what candidate ends up being thrust into the Oval Office. Congress is simply too sclerotic, America is simply too broke, and the bureaucratic state itself is too slow and lacking in capacity to really make things happen. China spends a few years to build a science fiction-esque maglev train line; America spends a decade to replace old Amtrak trains with new ones that are somehow still slower than the old ones.
The reality of decline is increasingly hard to escape at this point. In fact, the more each side resorts to populism and scapegoating, the worse the decline seems to be. Political polarisation and the aggressive scapegoating of the other side now looks like the political equivalent of “empty calories” — a deeply unhealthy non-solution that just makes you worse off the more you indulge in it.
Mark Fisher’s dour, colourless age of capitalist realism is now decidedly over, though the man himself never lived to see it. Today, in the age of fake numbers, endless AI slop, and rabid partisanship shorn of even the slightest pretense of principles or intellectual honesty, that fact seems less like a blessing than it once did. After realism, we now live in an age of disconnected fantasy; yet for all that has changed, true political alternatives seem as elusive as ever.
