Tag Archives: Donald J. Trump

Harold Perkin, Donald Trump, and the Age of Corporate Neo-feudalism

1 Jun 2026 By in History, Ideas Tags: , , , , , , , 2 Comments
Satirical cartoon from Puck's magazine in 1885, depicting a handful of powerful men carving up a continent and all its goodies.

It must have been in the late 90s. I was living in Hyde Park, and a friend invited me to a private lecture that Harold Perkin, a distinguished British historian, was giving. Perkin, who died in 2004, was pretty much the father of English social history. He was the very first person hired in the British university system to teach the history of society. His main scholarly work, The Origins of Modern English Society, 1780-1880, established his interest in how industrial forces impact national characteristics such as class. Perkin’s passion for this subject had burned unabated since the book was first published in 1969.

The Perkin I saw was elderly, but his ideas were fresh and forward-looking. Now at the end of his career, his thoughts were trained on modern capitalism and its capacity to overwhelm political systems, impairing the enhanced freedom and power that individuals have enjoyed since the birth of market economies. Essentially, Perkin believed that contemporary global capitalism and its leaders represented an engrossing, trans-national system that no nation-state could match. He saw the rise of a hyper-wealthy elite as transforming society in ways that would impoverish and limit the majority. This was to be the subject of a book, one that Perkin get to write before he died.

The historical process whose implications Perkin had begun to lay out is now being felt across American society. The internet, the rise of real-estate investment “trusts,” the wealth gap, the economic dominance of a handful of monopolistic tech companies, the growth of cryptocurrencies, and, finally, AI: these developments and the people behind them are dictating the course of the United States. This new capitalist formation runs according to its own rules, which many of us lack the deep expertise to understand or discuss. Since Perkin’s time, this many-sided process has been given a name: corporate neo-feudalism.

Here are the hallmarks of corporate neo-feudalism, according to Google AI:

  • Extreme stratification, with a tiny elite commanding many essential resources and a majority owning nothing.
  • Rent-extraction and the development of a rentier class: corporations do not transfer ownership of goods or technology to individuals, instead requiring them to rent access to essentials such as software, information, and utilities.
  • Coercive legal agreements that blur and erode the individual’s rights of ownership, free speech, and privacy, such as the contracts that come with electronic devices, smart appliances, and cable TV.
  • A subversion of democratic power, whereby corporate interests pour so much money into lobbying and other forms of political patronage that citizens’ needs are irrelevant, their distinct interests ignored.
  • The privatization of essential “public goods,” such as information, health care, and household utilities, so that, to subsist, citizens must pay what corporations demand or go without, creating a perpetual dependence on self-interested capitalistic entities.
  • Arguably, these developments could reduce ordinary people to the status of serfs, by whittling away their capacity for truly “free” expression, upward mobility, or agency. Existence, independent of what corporations supply, becomes impossible, unthinkable. Essentially, tech is birthing new means of capital production–new, wealth-producing “tools” absorbing the resources of all for the benefit of a few.

The paradigm of corporate neo-feudalism is extraordinarily useful, even if it doesn’t hold true in all its details, and even if citizens remain convinced of their undiminished independence—for now. Corporate neo-feudalism gives a name to the changes Americans see taking place around them, as when local governments take the side of deep-pocketed corporations to create AI data centers; or when President Trump talks about turning Gaza into a luxury resort instead of respecting it as a Palestinian homeland.

In general, we can see how “corporate neo-feudalism” describes the types of people and interests that organize the president’s ambitions, policies, and world-view. He identifies with a hyper-wealthy elite who are birthing a new sort of mass society. He wants to be a respected leader among those “geniuses” intent on engrossing all the world’s goodies and creating new forms of wealth and money, without respect for niceties like Constitutional government, the health of the planet, or the people’s will. Trump is using the presidency not just to add to his fortune (initially based on old-fashioned real-estate), but to catapult himself upward into a nose-bleed social class, where his peers are not republicans but free (rogue) agents like Musk, Altman, MBS, Putin, and Xi. To Trump, enriching himself and cementing his position within this new world order matters much more than his fellow-citizens do. Trump consistently looks past the nation-state, and cares not a jot if, in the eyes of Americans, his actions are thoroughly corrupt. A trans-national miscreant, Trump knows he can easily transcend our rule of law.

This new economic profile of the US matters because our republican form of self-government pre-supposes widespread independence and prosperity. American government has a circular quality, in that a big part of its purpose has always been to create a populace that is educated, capable, and prosperous, because it is from the people that each generation of leaders must rise. Citizens must be autonomous, discerning, and well-informed to be self-governing; if they are consigned to a dependent, servile class instead, the future of American federalism will be bleak indeed.

When Trump promised the nation a “Golden Age” in his second inaugural, was it “corporate neo-feudalism” that he had in mind? This term, along with Trump’s fondness for tariffs and other grandiose qualities, recall the Gilded Age, that glitzy, vulgar period following the end of Reconstruction (1876) and the waning of the idealism of the Civil War. The late-nineteenth century was characterized by revolutionary innovations (think railroad empires, steel manufacture, the birth of oil, the use of telephone and telegraph, and the commodification of agriculture), which, in turn, generated great wealth disparities, political corruption, and a long stretch of low, lost politics. Captains of industry amassed unimaginable fortunes, running roughshod over flat-footed officials and callously exploiting the powerless with impunity. The political mind of America just couldn’t keep up. Will this be the case in the Golden Age, too?

Image: Fred Opper’s 1882 illustration for Puck,
“Monopoly Millionaires Dividing The Country,”
from this source.

Touchstones: David Brooks

23 May 2025 By in Politics, Protest and Protestors, The Trump Years Tags: , , , , , , , 2 Comments
A protest sign featuring images of Donald Trump and two senators, with the text 'They don't care who they hurt or what you lose.'

Donald Trump is a bulldozer: He pushes ahead, then stops and backs up, only to push again. His many-sided assault on Americans and American greatness goes ahead in fits and starts, but on it goes. His party and a constellation of loyalist hacks constitute the machine. The destruction is general and all around. Free speech, the regulatory state, time-honored alliances and trade relations, hunger relief, egalitarianism, ideals of excellence in thought and culture: all are being struck with astonishing speed. The challenge is to sabotage the bulldozer, when one has only words and can’t get anywhere near the thing.

This is no time for parochialism or single-issue politics. The president’s broad-scale attack on ideals and institutions requires that Americans unite in opposition, a broad-based opposition that transcends party and focuses on what we as a nation, and as citizens, stand to lose. As David Brooks wrote in a recent column,

It’s time for a comprehensive national civic uprising. It’s time for Americans in universities, law, business, nonprofits and the scientific community, and civil servants and beyond to form one coordinated mass movement. Trump is about power. The only way he’s going to be stopped is if he’s confronted by some movement that possesses rival power.

Sound daunting? The fact is that “white-collar resistance” is in our DNA. Standing up for freedom and against that which would enslave us, is the backbone of American history. Generations of thought-leaders and old-time influencers articulated the aspirations that formed us into a nation and empowered us to throw off monarchical rule. Federalists like Madison and Hamilton used the power of the pen to galvanize sentiment in favor of the Constitution. Nineteenth-century writers and preachers, including such figures as William Garrison, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Frederick Douglass, waged a campaign of conscience that ultimately led to slavery’s abolition. Martin Luther King, Jr., though witness to racial violence and confronted with mortal peril every step of the way, persevered in a brilliant moral quest to strike down Jim Crow and enshrine black equality in American law.

What all these campaigns show is that when enlightened Americans band together for the sake of good, the good prevails. Moreover, civil dissent is a moral necessity when officialdom willfully violates deeply held political and spiritual values to which the population adheres. This is why the Bill of Rights was amended to the US Constitution: to protect us against, and empower us to oppose, federalism gone awry. Moralists, intellectuals, and private citizens have often been called on to “bend the arc of history,” their voluntary initiatives bringing our systems back from moral bankruptcy, closer to the foundational dream of liberty, prosperity, and domestic calm.

It’s hard to accept that Trump and his project 2025 etc. are calling us to such an amorphous and momentous endeavor. After all, isn’t this why we have parties and leaders? Yet, when we look back, the answer is that sometimes leaders and parties fail, when the measures they embrace threaten to degrade or trammel citizens or take us down a perilous trail. So, Jefferson at home, hearing about the Missouri Compromise in 1820, likened it to a “fire-bell in the night.” Despite the apparent tranquility of his private life, the retired statesman heard a mortal alarm portending political disaster, ringing far away. Something very similar is happening now. Each of us must hear the fire bell and join the bucket-brigade, before our great federal system smolders and implodes.

Cited: David Brooks, “What’s Happening Is Not Normal. America Needs an Uprising That Is Not Normal,”NYT (April 17, 2025). This article may not be accessible without a subscription. I encourage you to support the New York Times if you can!

Touchstones: Kim Lane Scheppele

20 May 2025 By in Politics, Protest and Protestors, The Trump Years Tags: , , , , 2 Comments

The bloodless transformation of our government into a harmful instrument of power is surreal. The people’s obligation to object to the executive’s abuse of his power is one we’ve never been called to on this scale. Normally, we rely on Congress to check the president through the power of impeachment and to assert its authority as a law-making body vis-a-vis the president, whose proper role is to execute and abide by Congress’s will. This isn’t happening. Instead, governmental institutions are being gutted and the president is forcefully intimidating universities, broadcasting companies, newspapers, and prominent individuals who together uphold our civil liberties, maintain civil society, and keep us informed.

Kim Scheppele is an American sociologist who studies authoritarian regimes and those who oppose them. She points out that Americans are relatively disadvantaged because they have never experienced authoritarianism before. They differ from the Poles, for example, whose history of subjugation over the centuries has served them well. When the independence of their judiciary was threatened in recent years, Poles immediately took to the streets and averted an erosion of the rule of law.

Our power to resist Donald Trump’s authoritarian tendencies will never be greater than it is right now. As Trump indulges his appetite for absolute power and makes a kleptocracy out of “the land of the brave,” will Americans sit by?

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Touchstones: Timothy Snyder

19 May 2025 By in Politics, The Trump Years Tags: , ,
A colorful sign on a chair reads 'ONLY PUTIN BENEFITS'.

What is a touchstone? It’s a special rock mineralogists use to determine whether a shiny object is really gold. Metaphorically, a touchstone is anything that helps distinguish between what is truly excellent and what’s counterfeit. Intellectually, touchstones illuminate what’s wrong with Trumpism and how to oppose it incisively, in a way that’s appropriate and principled.

Touchstones recall what’s best in our political tradition and galvanize us to reject the fake, crude representations Trump constantly spews. At present, American politics is a battle between his word and ours. We must prevail against a leader who is un-American and mean.

Here’s political historian Timothy Snyder in late February, outlining why Trump’s position on Ukraine is so damaging to our position in the world, and so unwise. Trump’s public denigration of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy showed a willful disrespect for our own revolutionary tradition and, indeed, for the values of the entire Western world. Disdaining European friendships intrinsic to our security and prosperity, Trump has inexplicably cottoned to a pro-Russian narrative, subverting American ideals of self-government for the sake of a repressive foreign power bent on weakening us.

No matter what Trump claims, his radical positions on Ukraine and on trade are deeply damaging to our international relationships and US stature in the world. His policies weaken the nation and harm its citizens. He relishes driving the US into isolation–a situation that benefits only himself but not us.

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The Honor of Our Country Is in Danger

7 Nov 2022 By in Politics Tags: , , , , , 3 Comments
The ghosts of Washington and Lincoln stand watch over the presidential chair that James G. Blaine is attempting to approach.

Given the dire politics of today, the notion that the United States is undergoing a steep and irreversible decline is easy to entertain. The lifespan of republics being notoriously short, and the signs of decay being abundant, American prospects are suddenly, unexpectedly bleak. The nation that’s risen to such heights, that’s given its people so much, now seems destined to decline and fall. The conflict between the parties has been going on for so long, and the tone of public life is so low, and the bad people among us so bold and numerous, that many of us have reluctantly given up the nation for lost.

We have resisted and objected to each new outrage, each new manifestation of mendacity and corruption, but with such mixed results and with such persistence of myriad malignant forces that many of us are demoralized and exhausted.

Americans who have fought for years to marginalize Trump and keep good people in power have yet to score a decisive victory. Even now, two years after American voters defeated Trump at the polls, they cannot yet rejoice. It’s still too soon to rejoice, too soon to say that the federal system is safe.

Take heart. Americans have seen their nation deteriorating before. To be honest, much of US history consists of backsliding times, when wholesome pride in this glorious nation, and righteous service to it, has been nearly snuffed out, thanks to the wily machinations of low-lifes and thieves.

Even in times of peace and prosperity, the United States has suffered setbacks and indignities, as corrupt and self-seeking charlatans (such as James G. Blaine, depicted above) have tried to rise, aiming to monopolize a great system of government they can only disgrace.

Long is the fight, but good Americans are too stalwart to cede victory to the dark forces still pressing in.

 

Image:
Bernhard Gillam, “The Honor of the Country in Danger,”
published in Puck magazine 29 October 1884,
 from this source.

IMAGE NOTE: In this masterful 1884 political cartoon by Bernhard Gillam, the ghosts of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln stand watch over a presidential chair that the unworthy James G. Blaine aspires to.  As the United States approached the centenary of its Founding in 1889, would the century that began with George Washington as president end in disgrace with the likes of Blaine?  (Opponents dubbed Senator Blaine, “the Continental Liar from the State of Maine.”)

In the 1884 election, Democrats sought to rout a Republican party that, since its glory days in the Civil War (1861-1865), had grown disreputable and corrupt.  The Republican Party’s rise to power in the 1850s on the strength of its principled opposition to slavery, coupled with its noble defense of the Union and victory over the rebel proslavery states, issued in an enduring political monopoly.  Beginning with Lincoln’s election in 1860, Republicans controlled the White House for twenty-four years.  The Democratic Party, having been tolerant of slavery before the war, was tainted and nationally anathema for all this time. 

During Reconstruction (1865-1876), Republican control of the federal government guaranteed that former slaveholders would not regain power and undo all that the Civil War had so painfully accomplished.  Excessive power in the hands on one party, however, allowed political mendacity and corruption to flourish.  In addition, support gradually waned for the monopolistic use of federal power (including military power) to protect minority rights in Southern states.  Open-ended coercion violated the principles of self-government and reserved state powers on which the Constitution is based.

In 1876, these contradictions and other, more ignoble considerations led the Republicans to abandon the Reconstruction policies that had kept the former Confederate states from reverting to the status quo ante bellum. Thereafter, commercial prosperity replaced racial equality as the Republican Party’s top priority. The Grand Old Party’s degenerate condition became unmistakably evident in 1884, when it chose the slippery James G. Blaine as its presidential nominee.

In the cartoon, Blaine is depicted as an imposter who is out of his league.  His scandal-ridden past is indelibly tattooed on his flesh.  The flimsy cloak he wears can’t hide his true nature as a servile tool.

He stands abased before the lofty legacy of past presidents.  His hat, labeled “Corruption,” is falling off, as, quaking, he begins his assault on the nation’s highest office.  Leaning against him and pushing him from behind is Jay Gould, who excelled in getting government concessions for the railroads he owned.  Gould has his sights set on stacking the bench.  The paper he holds reads “Four Supreme Court judges to be appointed by the next president.” 

Also behind Blaine is Stephen W. Dorsey, a former US Senator implicated in the “Star Routes Scandal,” whereby a circle of profiteers bilked the Treasury of millions of dollars by colluding on bids for carrying the mail.  Dorsey is depicted as a bootlicker.  Next to him on the floor is a paper that reads “Honesty No Requisite for the Presidency (Blaine’s Theory).”

Finally, to the right of the stairs stands Benjamin F. Butler, dressed up as a court jester possessing a “Bargain with Blaine.”  Butler’s controversial actions as the military governor of wartime New Orleans, coupled with his opportunistic political maneuverings, made him a weathervane of the Gilded Age.  Vastly wealthy as a result of both honest and questionable business dealings during the Civil War, Butler was arguably providing cover for Blaine in 1884, for he was on the ticket as a third-party presidential candidate for the People’s Party.  Rumor held that Butler’s candidacy was a Republican-backed sham, to draw off votes from Blaine’s opponent, Democrat Grover Cleveland.

It was no use.  On Election Day in November 1884, Americans went to the polls and saved the nation from James G. Blaine.  They rejected the stink of Republican corruption and, for the first time since 1856, elected a Democratic president.