Introduction

On November 8, 2016, a large percentage of the United States population (and a not-insignificant proportion of the world) learned that they had been deep believers in American exceptionalism. It had been thought impossible that Donald Trump—the oft-bankrupt real-estate developer, a thrice-married Republican candidate with an admitted penchant for sexual assault, and a “short-fingered vulgarian” (in the immortal words of the late-1980s Spy Magazine)—could defeat Hillary Clinton, one of the most accomplished and careful candidates ever nominated. In an America always reaching for perfection, striving for the best, arcing slowly toward universal justice, such a miserable character could surely not become President. Yet triumph he did. Nationalist movements in Hungary, India, Poland, Turkey, and the Philippines, previously dismissed as the politics of backwaters, suddenly seemed to augur a new world of barriers, walls, and autochthony.

Since assuming office, the Trump administration (if that word really applies to this conglomeration of plain incompetence, naked ambition, aspirational fascism, and juvenile egoism) has threatened to upend many of the political, social and economic conventions that have long been maintained in the United States. Because the United States remains a hegemonic superpower, if a declining one, the expectations of the entire globe have been upended. Long standing alliances such as NATO are coming into question. Globalism itself—in both its intellectual, cosmopolitan variety and its late-capitalist, free trade form—is threatened by a nativist white nationalist agenda that has suddenly found its way into the inner sanctum of authority.

This condition produces an inordinate number of fears, questions, and responses. Demonstrators around the world, the media, the courts, and other social and political actors have risen up to stop or ameliorate the emerging conditions of nationalist authoritarianism. Misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia are similarly being resisted and decried. Undocumented individuals and their communities, as well as communities of color more generally, have been targeted, and are collectively revising their corresponding public presences even as the sanctuary movement, protests, and legal procedures are seeking to come to their aid. But in all of this, many questions remain unanswered. Is this administration really a break with past policies vis a vis the undocumented or just an acceleration of past practices? Is the war on women’s health something new or the culmination of a long erosion of feminism? Is this the end of neoliberalism or just a much rawer, more violent model, a defensive clutch—and a subsequent turn to fascism—to protect the capitalist core of the global economy? In other words, are Trump and Trumpism merely new forms of a very old capitalist, settler-colonial, misogynist, and homo/transphonic America, or do they represent a new metastasizing politics?

The answers to these questions will guide the possible coherence and effectiveness of resistances, acquiescences, or refusals. Thus, the editors of Theory & Event have solicited a group of scholars to address what is happening and what more is to be done. We specifically asked these writers not to focus on the causes and meanings of Trump’s Electoral College victory but rather to address the present and the future, about what this means for liberalism, for the United States, and for the varieties of world-ordering currently undergoing such upheaval. Is this a watershed moment for liberalism, necessitating a choice between a slow embrace of corporate authoritarian nationalism and new forms of radical left solutions? How does the opposition to Trump and Trumpism, in all its variety as anarchists, cosmopolitans, communists, and internationalists come to understand its role in this moment? Should we instead follow the maxim of Mao Tse-Tung: “All is chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent”? If, as Jodi Dean argues in her essay, the left has for a long time been marked by a penchant for thinking that it no longer exists, what new forms can and will it take as it is energized by the collapse of liberal ideologies and the appearance of the fascist fist that perhaps always resided inside that velvet glove? The authors we have turned to are far from speaking with one voice. But all agree: we are in...