The political revolution of 2024 will not be a revolution at all if it merely exchanges one Deep State for another, one deception for another, one enemy for another, Iran instead of Russia, one target group for dehumanization instead of another, trans people or immigrants instead of white men. The real revolution is a revolution of love. It is a revolution of peace. It is a revolution of healing.
After the bulldozer
If the US does not return to humanity and cooperation, Donald Trump’s political “clean-up operation” will be followed by new disorder.
Some watch with horror and others with glee as Donald J. Trump plows through American politics with a bulldozer. Those who see through the deep-seated corruption in the ruling institutions are cheering. But before we rejoice too loudly, we should think about what will be built from the rubble.
by Charles Eisenstein
[This article posted on 4/15/2025 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.manova.news/artikel/nach-dem-bulldozer.]
That will depend on the values and loyalties of those who build. If they do not embody humanistic values and recognize fundamental moral truths, then their constructions will be just as ugly as what they destroyed, or even uglier.
The most important thing about these truths and values—and the thing most easily forgotten in times of conflict—is so fundamental that it often degenerates into platitude. Every human being, regardless of origin, race, creed, nation, ethnicity, or life situation, is equally a miracle of creation, capable of suffering, joy, and sorrow (…) a complete human being, no less and no more loved by God than any other. This idea is the basis of the political enlightenment that began in the 17th century, with its teachings on human rights and individual freedoms, the rule of law, legal certainty, and democratic government. It also led to the abolition of slavery and the establishment of women’s, gay, and civil rights. “All people are created equal.”
I have outlined this thinking in monotheistic terminology, but other spiritual traditions can express it just as well. It is a universal truth, the truth of compassion. Our separateness is an illusion. None of us is made of better stuff than anyone else. We may be unequal in our gifts, infirmities, and fortunes, but our fundamental value is the same.
I hope this doesn’t sound too moralizing or patronizing—spirituality at the kindergarten level—but Trump’s rhetoric and tactics need to be called out. This is most obvious on the issue of immigration: the dehumanization of illegal immigrants, the denial of the circumstances that brought them here, and the failure to acknowledge the suffering caused by arbitrary deportations. Nothing good will come of this. Nothing good comes from disregarding the truth of compassion. Not only will this harm immigrants, it will also harm citizens of the United States.
What kind of country will we become if we grant some people less dignity and freedom than others? What kind of country will we become if we treat the helpless brutally?
The more we fan the flames of hatred, the more fuel it will demand, and the more of us will burn.
Consider also the rollback of DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) principles in government and other organizational rulebooks. Conservatives have pointed to legitimate questions, such as the use of racial discrimination to redress the consequences of past racial discrimination. Or the pitfalls of downgrading achievement in education and the workplace. The absurdity and inappropriateness of some of the concepts introduced under the banner of DEI have caused strong resentment among the public.
However, let us not forget the moral impetus that originally gave rise to such concepts. It was concern for the deplorable situation of various minorities in the US, especially those with African roots. Slavery, genocide, the Jim Crow era, lynchings, and everything else left behind a lasting legacy, a legacy of poverty, a legacy of addiction, violence, incarceration, and mental illness. If we do not acknowledge this, we are not acting in reality. If we ignore the situation of our darker-skinned brothers and sisters, we abandon our foundation of moral truth. We don’t have to adopt the discourse of “critical race theory” to recognize the urgency of a response.
This is not just about altruism. Society cannot be healthy when large parts of it are suffering. The disease will spread. It already has.
Today, many rural white towns in the Midwest of the US have fallen into a state of decay that was once the preserve of inner-city ghettos and Native American reservations: dollar stores, pawn shops, meth labs, depression, suicide, cancer, addiction, and despair are everywhere. And the walls of privilege—both literal and figurative—cannot keep some forms of this decay away from even the wealthiest enclaves. Addiction, disease, abuse, and depression find their way there too.
The principle that links the well-being of a few to the well-being of the rest can also be applied to the relationship between states. No country can be “great” and significant if its greatness and significance come at the expense of others. A leader is not someone who most successfully dominates others. A leader is someone who shows the way, who leads by example, who benefits everyone. In world politics, America cannot achieve greatness and significance by grabbing and bullying, by waging a trade war or any kind of war. Such an approach may bring short-term economic benefits on the surface, but because it ignores the truth of interconnectedness, it will ultimately create poverty and accelerate the country’s decline.
No country can prosper if it closes itself off to global cooperation or rushes headlong into a competition of all against all. Those days are over.
The maturing process of world civilization is precisely about uniting for something greater than the self-interest of nations or individuals. Competition plays an important role, but winning cannot be the ultimate goal.
It’s like in sports. The game has its rules, which all parties agree to for their own benefit and for the benefit of the game itself. Everyone agrees that there is something more important than getting the ball into the goal. If that were the most important thing, the game would no longer be a game, but a battlefield, and killing skills would replace soccer skills.
Critics on the left and right have rejected the “rules-based international order” — and with good reason, because it was the US that made the rules to its own advantage and also broke them with impunity. Nevertheless, the core of the idea is right. To prevent competition from destroying us all, we must agree on its rules. But this agreement must not serve solely to prevent destruction, because then the incentives to cheat would be too strong. Instead, it must serve a common hope, something that unites all of humanity proudly under a common goal. Donald Trump’s emphasis on “winning” is out of step with the times. However, even if those times are over, that does not mean that a head of state should reject any notion of national self-interest. No foreign ruler can know as well as a people’s elected leader what they want and need. But that leader, that government, must also understand that the prosperity of the nation depends on the prosperity of other nations.
Any nation that forgets this and denies the truth of mutual interdependence will reap the opposite of what it seeks. If it strives for prosperity, it will reap poverty; if it strives for security, it will reap permanent threat. The violence it exercises abroad penetrates its own cities, its homes, its population, and takes all forms of civil, domestic, and internal violence.
The situation in Palestine illustrates this principle very clearly. Israel invokes its own security as a pretext for oppressing, dispossessing, and slaughtering the Palestinians, but it has not even achieved that. This is because security cannot be achieved in this way. It cannot be achieved through an “us against the world” worldview. It cannot be achieved by denying the fundamental truth of our interconnectedness. Endless war against others and endless vigilance do not mean security. They mean the opposite.
The same applies to the United States. The us-against-the-world view of national chauvinism reduces the diversity of other societies to simple binary categories. When we treat other nations or simply other people as implacable enemies, they usually assume the role we have prepared for them. The hardliners gain power and see their belief that we ourselves are the implacable enemy confirmed. Russia is …, Iran is …, China is …—these are not fixed, objective quantities. Just as in interpersonal relationships, others change depending on how we view them and what kind of relationship we invite them into. This is another truth of mutual connectedness.
The Trump administration seems to understand that the unipolar era is over, that the United States must give up its dream of world domination and accept a multipolar world order. But multipolarity does not have to mean a general free-for-all in which the US becomes the top bully on its section of the playground, squeezing as much as possible out of the weaker children in its shrunken sphere of influence.
Whether in the bipolar world of the Cold War, the unipolar era of American hegemony that followed, or in today’s multipolar world, nothing good can come of limiting the concept of “winning” to individual nation states.
History records this truth without a doubt: the “great” dominant empires suffered internally from the mirror image of their imperialist tyranny; they all rotted from within. This is all the more true today, when technological progress has woven the destinies of nations and the destiny of humanity more closely together than ever before.
Genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, ecological collapse, and good old nuclear weapons underscore the need for a global agreement to cooperate in order to curb competition between states. Conservative readers may disagree with me when I mention “ecological collapse” because they equate it with the problem of man-made global warming.
But even those who reject this scientific theory need not reject, along with their love of nature and spiritual intuition, the idea that everything we do to the living world—just like to nations and people—we do to ourselves. The expansion of drilling, fracking, mining, and deforestation, and the deregulation of industry that Trump promises, do not just cause greenhouse gases. They destroy habitats, devastate entire ecosystems, and pump toxins into the living body of the Earth. We will all suffer as a result. Our lives will suffer. Our children will suffer. Our spirit will suffer.
By joining Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s demands, Donald Trump has made “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) his own cause. I believe he means it. However, health cannot be achieved in isolation. We can do everything Kennedy advised. We can avoid industrially processed foods. We can subject vaccination schedules to independent scientific review. We can close the revolving door for conflicting interests in health agencies. We can thoroughly investigate the effects of pesticide residues, PFAS, microplastics, hormone-disrupting chemicals in drinking water, electromagnetic radiation, and psychiatric drugs, and take steps to protect the public.
But health will remain unattainable if the state continues to promote genocide and ecocide around the world. Only a sick nation does such a thing — and doing such a thing makes a nation sick.
The us-versus-them mentality I have described permeates the political culture down to its very core. Politically engaged readers who have read this far may try to understand this essay from the perspective of “Which side is Eisenstein on?” Just as in foreign policy or any other field, this view obscures diversity and nuance. Both “Trump the hero” and “Trump the villain” leave a lot out. The same goes for “Eisenstein supports Trump” or “Eisenstein is against Trump.” Let’s stop this. We can set aside the framing of current events in terms of two sides working against each other.
We don’t need to subscribe to this narrative and throw our lot in with one side or the other. Beyond that, beyond its false simplicity and the desires or fears it reinforces, we can see obvious truths. We can withdraw our political support from programs that are not based on these truths. We can advocate for programs that are based on them.
Let’s not fool ourselves. Yes, the institutions that Trump is dismantling are completely corrupt. They have maintained a system of lies and secrecy that has been in place for at least two generations. Under the cloak of these lies, they have committed crimes so heinous and far-reaching that their shock value alone makes them seem unrealistic and unbelievable.
But let’s remember:
If those who root out the corrupt institutions are not guided by compassion and transparency, honesty and humility, what replaces them will not be one bit better.
A new Deep State will replace the old one. A war on corruption will turn into a war on political opponents. Censorship will not be abolished, only relocated. The AI tools that Musk & Co. are using to destroy corrupt institutions can be repurposed as terrible instruments of control. Those who are convinced of their own righteousness, those who are addicted to winning, those who see the world in terms of us versus them, those who forget the dignity and value of every human soul, will most certainly abuse the power they have seized. What will they do when their deceptive measures fail? Will they willingly relinquish their power? Will they hand over the powerful tools they have developed to the other side?
The political revolution of 2024 will not be a revolution at all if it merely exchanges one Deep State for another, one deception for another, one enemy for another, Iran instead of Russia, one target group for dehumanization instead of another, trans people or immigrants instead of white cis men. The real revolution is a revolution of love. It is a revolution of peace. It is a revolution of healing. It is a revolution of forgiveness. We all know this on some level because it is obvious.
You listen to a true story from a migrant or a Black mother or a white person from the countryside or a Monsanto executive or anyone despised by an ideology, and the truth comes to light: you are my brother, you are my sister, it is only by the grace of God that I am not in your shoes.
The revolution is to integrate this understanding into our systems and align our coexistence on this planet with this truth. Let’s not pretend it’s any different.