The new heart of darkness by Ernst Lohoff, 12/12/2025

The New Heart of Darkness: The US and the New World Disorder (krisis 2/2025)

Ernst Lohoff

[This article posted on 12/12/2025 is translated from the German 0n the Internet, http://www.krisis.org‘]

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Summary

The USA is considered the motherland of modern democracy. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt declared his country the “arsenal of democracy.” During the Cold War, the USA assumed the role of protector and leader, rallying the “Western community of values” around it. But now, under Trump’s presidency, liberal democracy is being rapidly destroyed in its motherland. The MAGA movement and its representative in the White House are waging a veritable campaign against the separation of powers, the rule of law, academic freedom, and the mass media critical of the government. This marks a new stage in the global advance of authoritarianism. In an attempt to understand this threatening development, many liberals, but also large sections of the left, are looking to historical constellations from the past. Some talk of a return to isolationism in the US, others of a relapse into imperialism. The American philosopher Jason Stanley and many others, on the other hand, believe that the US is clearly moving toward fascism. However, the old label of fascism obscures what is fundamentally new about today’s historical situation.

Of course, the Manichean worldview of the MAGA movement is fatally reminiscent of Italian fascism and Germanon the nternet, n National Socialism. While politics in liberal democracy consists of mediating between competing interests, politics for Trumpism, just as it once did for fascism, is essentially a friend-enemy relationship. However, in today’s crisis-ridden capitalism, this highly destructive understanding of politics exists in a very different social context than it did before 1945: in fascism and National Socialism, anti-Semitism and aggressive nationalism were linked to the idea of the “total state” (Carl Schmitt). Its task was to create and secure the “people’s community.” An essential part of this was to grant social benefits to all “workers of the brow and fist” loyal to the regime and their fertile women. External aggression and social integration, as well as internal national economic formation, were thus two sides of the same coin. In Trumpism, on the other hand, hostility toward illegalized migrants, “wokeness,” and “liberal elites” is a substitute for the real integration of society. At the same time, it lends a new quality to the general process of social decay. In terms of ideology, this is reflected above all in a reversal of the relationship to the state compared to the fascist movements of the 20th century. For the latter, the almighty “total state” was a positive utopia that needed to be realized. In the imagination of the MAGA movement, however, the “total state” has long existed in the form of the “deep state,” which allegedly seeks to destroy individual freedom. To borrow Carl Schmitt’s formula, this represents something like the “absolute enemy.” The fight against the imaginary “deep state” serves as justification for a project to destroy the real state. The latter is visibly losing its ability to hold capitalist society together.

Trumpism represents new wine in old bottles. The open contempt for democratic rules and their deliberate violation, as well as the patterns of thought popular in the MAGA movement, are reminiscent of the darkest chapters of the 20th century. However, the major social changes it is bringing about can only be understood in the context of the current stage of development of the commodity-producing world system. The idea that Trump’s program will lead to a return to past conditions is only plausible as long as one sticks to pure ideological criticism and refrains from a realistic analysis.

Even behind the “America First” rhetoric, which ties in with the isolationist tradition, there is a program that is as different from the goals of historical isolationism as fire is from water. Historical isolationism was the accompanying ideology of a self-centered development. From its founding until World War II, the US pursued the goal of building a largely self-sufficient national economy that would dominate the entire American double continent and be independent of imperial competition. Trumponomics, on the other hand, represents the dream that the US could continue to enjoy all the benefits of globalization while foisting all the burdens on its former partners. The US IT industry’s global market monopoly is to be further expanded, and tax cuts will increase the US’s dependence on foreign capital inflows. At the same time, the other side of the transnational division of labor, the deindustrialization of the US, is to be reversed through tariff policy. The hegemon has mutated into a blackmailer who is destroying the foundations of the capitalist world system for the sake of short-term competitive advantages.

As destructive as this policy is, it is contemporary in its own way. It is not the course of the US government that is anachronistic, but the paradigm that economic liberalism and political freedom are two sides of the same coin. Anyone who tries to defend both together can ultimately only fail. In another respect, Trump-style authoritarianism is also far ahead of the defenders of liberal democracy. Although the liberal camp has been talking about the need for a “global domestic policy” for decades, this has never meant more than strengthening international organizations and calling for closer cooperation between states. The classic separation of foreign and domestic policy and the concept of state sovereignty were not questioned, but taken for granted. The US president and his colleagues in Russia and China are throwing both out the window and literally pursuing “global domestic policy.” It is high time to counter this with an emancipatory global domestic policy instead of trying to save “liberal democracy.” The latter is a historical relic.