I’m reacting much belatedly to an article by George Monbiot, a noted environmentalist and Guardian columnist. The article is called “The fact that humans can only survive on Earth doesn’t bother Trump – and I know why”, and was published on 5 March this year. The subtitle announces that “Vengeful nihilism is a big part of the Maga project.”
Monbiot proceeds to share his suspicion that “the war being waged against life on Earth by Donald Trump, Elon Musk and their minions” may be actually prompted by the gang’s wish to see the actual destruction of the planet rather than simply milk it dry following ultracapitalistic ideas. Monbiot then speculates that Trump’s obsession with power is possibly fuelled by his urge to be “the last of the emperors: to close the chapter on civilisation.” Monbiot describes some of Trump’s policies, seemingly aimed at destroying the US environment, as “gleeful vandalism.”
He connects next this glee with MAGA’s vengeful nihilism, “the destruction of what they do not love, know or understand,” which is being applied, as we’ve seen in the seven months since the article was published, to culture, science and basic human rights. Where I differ from Monbiot is in the critique against the project to occupy Mars, which, as a reader of Kim Stanley Robinson’s SF Mars trilogy, I defend (yes, I do).
I’m as horrified as many other SF fans that this project is falling into Elon Musk’s greedy hands before we fully understand its requirements and consequences. I agree with Monbiot that Musk’s project sounds suspiciously like “the definitive fantasy of escape: from decency, care, love and the living planet itself” and a sort of lay rapture, but, still, we’re going to Mars, sooner or later, ideally when we have managed to protect all of life on Earth and understand how to rewild the dead red planet. Monbiot, nonetheless, warns, very sternly, that Mars is hostile to human life and closes his article with “This is our heaven, and there can be no other.” Fair enough.
I’ve read the 257 comments by The Guardian’s readers, and I’m here summarizing the main ideas. Essentially, three arguments are invoked in the attempt to make sense of the dystopia flooding the USA. One is personal. Trump is a stupid (their word…) old man who cares nothing for the future because he will soon die, but who requires instant gratification; hence his rants, tantrums, and wild executive orders. He wants to feel empowered and is acting out of a grudge against the social elites that rejected him, given his shady business credentials and glaring personal shortcomings. Consider who he is married to, and you can see how far he is from true upper-class America.
The second and third arguments are quite similar but are split on two camps, both aiming at the destruction of the planet. On the one hand, MAGA Christian fundamentalists care nothing about the world because they believe in Heaven; bringing on havoc will precipitate Apocalypse, hence the Rapture. On the other hand, Silicon Valley techno transhumanists want to empty the planet of 90% of unwanted human presence to build their techno AI-controlled utopia. If the planet is destroyed in the process, they aim to survive in their notorious New Zealand bunkers, or (Musk’s option) migrate to Mars.
These two groups are in tension because, being hardly educated, MAGA supporters hate science and technology, which the transhumanists need to construct their utopia. As you can see, of the two groups, the technobros appear to be the more senseless because they fail to understand that with an empty or devastated Earth their wealth will evaporate, and they will hold no authority over the armed survivalists that will kill them, probably the employees of their own security teams.
None of The Guardian readers mentions patriarchy or masculinity, but it’s obvious that the main players deciding the fate of current civilization are patriarchal men, both the first-row politicians (Trump, Putin, Xi and their imitators) and the backstage puppeteers (Thiel, Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos and whoever does this job in Russia and China). Patriarchal masculinity, I’ve been explaining for more than 25 years now, is not ALL of masculinity, but a subset characterized by a strong entitlement to power, which, once conquered, the men in question seek to perpetuate at all costs, mainly by controlling and/or exterminating their enemies. Patriarchal power may die out with the patriarch or be overturned by a revolution, but will always try to stage a comeback through democratic election (or a pretence thereof), or a takeover, violent or otherwise. Unless, of course, it’s inherited.
Now, what’s new today is that the endgame is shifting towards a so far unknown abyss, hence Monbiot’s concern that this is an expression of deep nihilism. Let’s agree, for convenience’s sake, that Trump, Putin, and Xi are on the same page, as predators who aim at dominating as much territory as possible, either through conquest or business, in order to exploit the local resources. This is classic imperialism: you have something I want and I take it from you, either through war or a trade agreement. In the worst-case scenario (what is happening in Gaza), I wipe you out to rebuild your land as I please, with the help of my allies. This is pure patriarchal rapine of the type seen in human history many times over. Yet, something else is at work.
What is new is the turn that US patriarchy is taking. Whether the impulse comes from MAGA’s Christian fundamentalism or from the technobros’ transhumanism, if the endgame consists of decimating human and non-human life in the US, or the whole planet, where is this leading?
In international strategic terms, it leads nowhere, for it is obvious that China is now in practice the world leader, and nothing will return the USA to the privileged position it used to occupy. It’s not clear whether Russia is, as some are claiming in the USA, just a paper tiger about to collapse, its finances in shreds because of the aggression against Ukraine or a still strong post-imperial economy. Whatever the case, the disintegration of the USA is helping Putin, over whom Trump has no real power, to survive politically. My argument is that whatever Trump thinks he is doing, he is actually destroying the international reputation of the USA and undermining his own nation beyond the wildest dreams of his rivals. His patriarchal expression of power may be satisfactory at a personal level, but it’s very costly for the internal and external survival of his own nation.
To recap, the same patriarchal system that promises to re-empower the USA is disempowering it, though it’s still early days and the effects of the onslaught on science, technology, healthcare, social security, migration, the environment, reproduction, LGTBIQ+ rights and many aspects of legislation and human rights will be made visible in about one year, when many people become unemployed and many die, including unvaccinated children.
The deployment of the National Guard in cities with Democrat mayors in states with Democrat governors indicates that the endgame might be a coup to be staged in 2026, to prevent voters from participating in the mid-term elections. The coup, which would confirm Trump as the authoritarian President he already is, would be followed by the suppression of the 2028 presidential election, or its reduction to the charade that elections are in Russia or China. A civil war is not likely, unless the US military, so far absolutely silent, splits in two. Or opposes Trump.
The problem with this scenario, which is the most likely one unless the Epstein files are soon published (supposing they do contain the material proving that Trump had sex with children), is that by 2028 very little will be left of the grandeur MAGA avowedly protects. The land will have been ravaged, the population deprived of fundamental rights, health, and even life. The USA will have become in effect Panem, and Trump the equivalent of President Snow. As Suzanne Collins explained in her Hunger Games dystopian trilogy, there is no advantage in falling from being a rich democracy into being an impoverished dictatorship, not even for the few privileged persons that run the show.
The other world powers we have now (the main patriarchies) come from disadvantaged backgrounds: both Russia and China used to be empires ruled by abusive monarchies that went through a Communist revolution and rebuilt themselves on the basis of rampant capitalism. The USA is taking the opposite trajectory: its current Government appears to be doing all it can to become an absolutist empire, complete with serfs if not slaves, by destroying a (mostly) fully functional economy and political system.
The supposition I find most intriguing is that Trump was supported by the technobros because he has the MAGA vote (or had), although the plan is to have him die soon (he’s old, and unhealthy) and replace him with VP Vance, a puppet in the hands of German-born billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel, known for his anti-democratic beliefs together with his friend Curtis Yarvin (this agitator has openly spoken of tyranny as a desirable form of government in the USA). Thiel appears to be, rather, in favour of Christian capitalist anarchism, which would place the two men at odds: one dreams of total control, the other of total freedom only regulated by God. Both are, in any case, nightmarish expressions of a new-style US patriarchy which has no plans for the future beyond (white) masculinist empowerment.
You might think that patriarchy has always operated in that way, and that the Cold War already set a precedent in pitting against each other two blocks that could cause the world’s destruction. What I find intriguing and quite inexplicable is that now, in 2025, the project is to destroy the very idea of democracy on which US world leadership was built after WWII, no matter how hypocritical that notion has always been. Patriarchal power is usually destroyed by rivals, but what astonishes today is how, having no reason to do so since it is already very powerful, US patriarchy is necrotizing the nation, I have no other word for it. Vengeful nihilism? Stupidity? A childish tantrum? All of it?
It is, besides, obvious by now that Trump is closely following Project 2025 (published in April 2023 by the Heritage Foundation, an American conservative think tank, indirectly inspired by Opus Dei). Project 2025 never acknowledges that its aim is to transform the USA from a democracy into a Christian dictatorship, but this can be inferred from the policies it proposes. The USA, in short, might eventually become a nation very similar to Franco’s Spain, or even to current Islamic dictatorships like Iran or Afghanistan.
What the new US patriarchal current is neglecting is that with no planet left, it can’t thrive. A reader objects to Monbiot’s supposition that Trump’s wants to be the last emperor ever, that this makes no sense as there would be nobody left to admire him. This is a return to the old argument that no one can win a nuclear war. During the Cold War, of course, US power always cast itself as the ‘good guy’ threatened by the Commie bully, whether the US President was Democrat or Republican. Today, however, the GOP has become an ultra-patriarchal machine aiming to devour US democracy at a time when world-wide democracy is needed to save the planet. It would be wonderful if these authoritarian men turned their energies into issuing orders to protect life but this will never happen because patriarchal authoritarianism is born of psychopathology, defined as an inability to show empathy and offer care.
So, can the planet survive the fall of US democracy for self-destroying nihilistic reasons? We might, if the US were the only patriarchal government in the world, but it turns out that most governments are patriarchal: founded on accruing power, rather than on serving the people. So, yes, we’re doomed. Unless the Epstein files are leaked and they do contain proof of paedophilia, the only crime which, apparently, a majority of Americans cannot forgive. What a thin hope…