It seemed to liberals that Trumpism arrived in 2016 without any intellectual backing or much of a policy script. Trump, like Brexit, was treated as a symptom of sustained economic dysfunction rather than the harbinger of a new future. The subsequent fiscal largesse of the Biden administration, partly influenced by the intellectual fruits of the Hewlett investments and heavily watered down by deal-making in Congress, was an attempt to draw a line under both neoliberalism and its apparent Trumpian death rattle. But the second Trump administration has destroyed such illusions, not only because of Trump’s own extraordinary political tenacity and reach, but because of the wealth of ideas that accompanied his revival. The notorious 900-page Project 2025 document, produced by the Heritage Foundation, collated the ideas of 350 conservative thinkers and 45 organisations to create the outline of a vision and a plan for the second Trump term.
While Trump’s first term looked like an aberration, a morbid symptom of a dying world, his second looks more like an attempt to enforce a new paradigm. The radical policies on trade, migration and international aid, the politicisation of federal spending and the attacks on constitutional process are made possible by the mania of the man at the centre, but they are being pursued according to an ideological agenda. As liberals struggle to get to grips with this takeover, they are forced to question some of their own presuppositions about regime change, political economy and the role of ideas in public life. To understand the intellectual coordinates of Trumpism requires us to look in less conventional places and to pay more attention to less obvious moments and rhythms. We may also need to reckon with the fact that, more and more, ideas can achieve influence and credibility by circumventing the world of academia altogether.
John Ganz’s When the Clock Broke is a study of a moment in American history that isn’t usually considered a crisis: the early 1990s, when the United States was reimagining and repositioning itself in a post-Cold War world. Pop sociology and snap history have depicted the 1990s as a period of triumph and triumphalism in ‘the West’, especially the US. Economic growth took off, the tenets of neoliberal economics were imposed across the world, investment poured into once dilapidated urban neighbourhoods and the World Wide Web made its first appearance. The period is encapsulated by the excruciating video of Bill Gates and his colleagues dancing on stage at Microsoft’s Windows 1995 launch, the equally cringeworthy video of the entire Democratic National Convention doing the ‘macarena’ a year later (both are on YouTube), or the sitcom Friends, in which twenty-somethings with casual jobs live in large apartments in Greenwich Village. Wasn’t this a time of naive optimism? Maybe, but only if you limit the story to the second half of the decade.
