Twirling Toward Freedom

Figuring out what it would look like if Trump were really trying for a long-term political realignment

I said back in November there are reasons to believe that Trump might represent the end stage of a historic political realignment. That post did not attempt to define the nature or the likely course of the realignment, which leads to today’s hypothesis and counter-hypothesis: Trump and Vance could either consolidate power by improving the alignment of the Republican party with the working class, or they could further entrench the current model of a DC uniparty that works for the oligarchs, with two superficially warring factions carrying on a phony fight to the death over issues the oligarchs don’t care about. As usual, it has taken me a long time to write the post.

The original impetus came from this lovely chart that was posted on Xitter right after the election. I can’t vouch for the method or the sources, but the chart gives a very nice sense of twirling toward freedom, or circling the drain, or whatever it is the United States is doing as a country.

Since November, even the dumber organs of the mainstream media have recognized that the Republicans and the Democrats have started down the road of swapping core constituencies. The Democrats have more of the over-educated and the wealthy than they did 20 years ago, while the Republicans have more of the working class. Here’s another version of the realignment argument. At least one persuasive commentator, Musa al-Gharbi attributes this to the takeover of the Democratic party by the professional managerial class (PMC), who (to oversimplify) are not actually very good at managing things in the real world because they prefer to deal with abstractions. Al-Gharbi refers to the PMC as “symbolic capitalists.” His thesis would seem to tie in with the themes of this blog pretty well.¹

Scope

The first assumption this post makes is that a long-term realignment is in play. The second assumption is that the realignment has not yet been fully accomplished. The third assumption is that it should be possible for a non-expert (like me) to look at how the Trump-Vance administration implements its policies and tell whether they are serious about delivering concrete material benefits for working class citizens in order to consolidate the realignment. I’m going to try to identify some benchmarks in different policy areas that can be used to evaluate what happens over the next few years. Along the way I will inevitably express disgust with both factions of the legacy uniparty in the United States, but/and the point of the post is not to express support for Trump-Vance or any other U.S. politician.

So my test hypothesis is that Trump and Vance might make relatively rational decisions on a multi-year time frame with the goal of delivering real benefits to working people. The bar for achieving this is set very low—if the Trump-Vance administration does a barely competent job of delivering material benefits for the working class, that would be better than what the two factions of the legacy uniparty have done for the past 30 years, including what Trump did during his first term.

Note that I’m talking about material benefits such as higher wages, better housing, price stability, or health care (as distinguished from “access” to health care through a corrupt intermediary a.k.a. insurance company). For purposes of this post it is important to distinguish material benefits (which the oligarchs want working people to have very little of) from culture war conflict and entertaining stunts that give supporters a dopamine rush (which we get plenty of precisely because the oligarchs do not care about these issues).

The test hypothesis seems at least somewhat plausible to me because Trump and Vance might be unusually motivated to create a scenario where Vance can win the 2028 election. Among other things, Trump probably does not want to retire with the threat of another round of prosecutions hanging over his head. I’m calling it the Trump-Vance administration because I think showcasing Vance will be an important goal (in contrast to what the Biden administration did with Harris). If that does not happen, it will be the first indication that my test hypothesis is false.

The null hypothesis I’m testing against is that Trump and Vance will continue the legacy uniparty scam in which both factions have basically the same macro-policies cloaked in divisive culture-war language, psyops, and stunts. Trump is well-suited by personality and by experience for the stunt politics of the recent past so the sensible thing would be to expect more of the same. If Trump and Vance continue with that approach then the Democrats will be in a better position to make a comeback in 2026 and 2028. Instead of Trump-Vance consolidating a realignment, the swing voters will keep swinging back and forth meaninglessly and we’ll continue following our current trajectory on every issue that matters to the oligarchs.

To put it another way, to hold the swingy members of the working class on the Republican side, Trump and Vance need to take actions that help the working class have a viable path to prosperity. If material conditions don’t get better for that elusive segment of the working class that shifts its allegiance in each election based on personal economics rather than media narrative, then nothing will really change. We’ll be looking at more 50-50 elections determined by stunts versus Taylor Swift endorsements rather than a fundamental realignment.

As a final note on scope, this post only considers domestic policy benchmarks. U.S. foreign policy is insanely chaotic right now, especially in Eurasia and north Africa, but it seems unlikely to get much better or worse under Trump-Vance, and will probably be hard to distinguish from the delusional, pro-genocide approach practiced by the Biden administration. A nuclear war could start at any time, but I haven’t thought of a rubric for evaluating that yet.

Immigration

Immigration was one of Trump’s biggest hot buttons on the campaign trail, and is also one of the areas where it will be easiest to tell if Trump and Vance are serious. I think the immigration issue works particularly well as a litmus test, and Trump and his followers have been making a big deal out of it since the election.

I accept as self-evidently true that reducing the number of undocumented non-citizens who are able to work in the United States would help the employment prospects of working class citizens. The economists who claim that immigration helps to increase GDP are not necessarily wrong. The problem is that all the gains go to the oligarchs and the cadre of sub-oligarchs and PMC oligarch-servicers who benefit from cheap labor. If nothing else, reducing the number of undocumented non-citizens who are able to work in the United States would require employers to pay somewhat more to get American citizens to mow lawns, pick crops, or work in chicken processing plants. Americans still might not want those jobs very much, but higher pay would give them a somewhat more viable fallback option when they can’t find work in their chosen trades (which happens to a lot of working class people nowadays).

The obvious way to reduce the number of undocumented non-citizens working in the U.S. is from the employer side, through administrative measures such as requiring employers to use E-Verify for real and cracking down on duplicate use of social security numbers. Trump actually did this for a little while late in his first term. If this type of enforcement is not expanded, then Trump is not serious about stopping employment of undocumented immigrants.

Trump did not campaign much on administrative measures involving employers, and instead promised massive deportations. Forcibly deporting enough people to make a difference would be extremely difficult. I have some experience dealing with the immigration service, and bureaucratic gridlock is one of the only things holding the entire edifice together. Unless Trump can get his bare majority in the House to approve a big budget increase to hire a deportation force on the scale of the TSA, mass deportations are simply not going to happen. A handful of highly visible PR raids would entertain hardcore Trump supporters in the short-term, and could reduce incoming numbers by scaring immigrants, but would not lead to a noticeable structural change in the economy for the disillusioned members of the working class the parties will be trying to persuade in 2026 and 2028.

Lately Trump has shifted from talking about deportations to talking about ending birthright citizenship. Ending birthright citizenship is a red herring at best. It is unlikely to succeed, and unlikely to make any immediate difference in the labor market if it did succeed. There is no process in American law for revoking the citizenship of people born in the United States. Even if Trump were somehow successful in eliminating birthright citizenship, it would only apply to babies born after the change. Fussing about birthright citizenship is a stunt – it may make Trump’s hard core supporters happy, but it will not create any tangible benefits for the working class in the time frame we are talking about.

In the past few weeks Trump has dismayed some of his supporters by talking about expanding legal opportunities to work in the United States such as H-1B visas. This is the opposite of what he should to do consolidate a working class base. H-1B visas are for “specialty workers” to fill jobs when employers claim there are shortages, so H-1B immigrants compete more with the PMC than with wage workers. Still, using H-1B workers to proletarianize the PMC does not help Trump-Vance earn the loyalty of the working class in the long run because it means that the children of the working class have less chance at upward mobility. Telling working class kids to learn to code becomes an even crueler joke if you’re going to import masses of people to take those jobs at lower pay for an 80 hour work week.

Peter Turchin has said that in order to restore stability in the U.S, we need to “bring the relative wage up to the equilibrium level (thus shutting down elite overproduction) and keep it there.” End Times at 202. “Equilibrium level” means working class wages and conditions need to improve enough that a somewhat larger percentage of working class people decide it is OK to be working class, so they don’t need to go to college and try to become PMC. But some of the youngsters still want to move up. Importing a bunch of people to take existing PMC slots makes it much harder to achieve a stable equilibrium. You’re basically clogging up the pressure relief valve for the already dysfunctional class system, and giving elite aspirants more reasons to identify with working class immigration grievances.

As with many other issues addressed in this post, the number of desperate people trying to immigrate could be significantly reduced if the United States adopted a less bloodthirsty and piratical foreign policy, and stopped robbing, bombing, and destabilizing other countries. Unfortunately there is no prospect of that happening, which is why I said I would not try to address foreign policy.

In short, there are two tells with immigration. If Trump and Vance want to benefit citizen wage laborers, they need to require all employers to start using E-Verify or something similar, with real social security numbers. In order to benefit citizens who aspire to the next steps up the economic ladder, Trump and Vance need to reduce H-1B visas, not expand them. I don’t think either of these indicators can easily be fudged. If Trump and Vance limit immigrant work opportunities in this way, then I think the effects will be visible, and may even lead to significant inflation, particularly in food and construction. I don’t think there is a way to avoid the risk of inflation if you’re trying to induce a broad increase in wages at the lower end of the scale.

If Trump and Vance don’t do these things, then I think it is fair to say they are not serious about consolidating a working class realignment.

And just to emphasize it once again, I am not saying this is my preferred policy outcome. The United States is a profligate and unethical nation on a path to collapse, and I have accepted that my preferred policy outcomes are not at all plausible in my lifetime. All I am saying is that this is what I think Trump and Vance would do if they were serious about consolidating a working class base in a multi-year time frame, given the promises they made and the coalition they established during the campaign, and given a realistic assessment of the economic background.

Tariffs and re-shoring manufacturing

For about 40 years, both factions of the oligarch-controlled uniparty have been in favor of free trade and outsourcing American industrial jobs to places where people work cheap. The Americans who previously held those jobs obviously wanted the jobs to stay here. Working class people lost that battle, and the United States has been largely deindustrialized as a result. This is not only causing economic distress for working people in flyover country, it has reached the point where the United States can’t manufacture things considered vital for national defense and other priorities.

Economists argued that free trade would increase America’s GDP, but they forgot to mention that the oligarchs would not only skim off all the gains from trade for themselves, they would steal even more by driving down the standard of living for working class Americans. Economists also forgot to mention the part about needing to import practically everything at a time when the uniparty wants to start wars with all the major exporters. Protectionism has a bad name, but things have gotten so far out of balance that some type of industrial policy is clearly needed.

A few weeks ago the big story was that Trump was going to restart American manufacturing by imposing massive tariffs. That story has now disappeared from the headlines in favor of immigration scare stories and whatever else Trump tweeted in the past 24 hours. Tariffs and industrial policy are difficult to do well. Imposing tariffs on goods that the United States has very little capacity to produce for itself will lead to short-term inflation and shortages followed by demand destruction rather than plentiful jobs.

Success on this issue will be harder to judge than immigration, because it requires evaluating whether Trump is appointing serious people and whether the solutions they come up with are working. Those evaluations can easily fall prey to partisan biases and ad hominen attacks. One thing to look for is whether Trump can stop picking fights over tough-guy sanctions and move toward tariffs or other measures that actually give a boost to viable American businesses. That is hard to do because the main presidential tariff authority is based on national security, but the task at hand is to figure out how to do it.

The other thing to look for is whether re-shored businesses (if any) actually start offering jobs Americans would take. It’s not just wages—we need to see more private sector working-class jobs that offer benefits, or else we need to see socialistic benefits to replace employment-based benefits. Either one would make working class life more acceptable to many people, helping to create Turchin’s equilibrium and consolidate the potential political realignment. If re-shoring occurs but it only produces jobs nobody would want (except perhaps an undocumented immigrant) then tariffs will not help Trump and Vance consolidate a working class Republican base.

Drill baby drill

In the latter part of the campaign, Trump repeatedly said that one of his highest priorities would be a “drill baby drill” energy policy. On its face this does not make a great deal of sense, at least not as it relates to gas prices. “Drill baby drill” is an inherently boom-bust policy that would most likely lead to big swings in fuel prices over a multi-year time frame.

I was in Ohio when I started working on this post, and gas was as low as $2.39 a gallon. That is as low as it’s been for a while, so Trump does not get to start from an easy benchmark. Gas has gone up a little since then, but it will be very difficult for Trump to keep gas prices at current levels for four years, much less lower them, and there is little reason to believe that U.S. shale operations are interested in developing overcapacity to reduce the prices they receive. Meanwhile, Trump’s early focus on recruiting Iran hawks for his foreign policy team suggests that world oil prices could go up drastically rather than coming down.

If Trump were serious about boosting the economy through domestic energy production, he would develop a long-term plan to stabilize American energy prices using shale production at a target price to help decouple the U.S. from the wild swings of the world oil market. If you want to encourage business confidence, you need to allow businesses to plan for longer term investment. This is especially true in capital intensive industrial sectors. Trump probably won’t be able to use Biden’s method of depleting the strategic oil reserve because Biden is leaving it pretty depleted, and anyway that isn’t a long-term plan.

Coming up with a plan to use domestic supply to stabilize energy prices for the next ten years or so would do far more to encourage domestic industrial investment than encouraging a boom-bust cycle. That doesn’t sound very Trump-like, but it’s something to look for to see whether Trump and Vance are serious about consolidating power for 2028 and beyond. Alternatively, if Trump and Vance would quit bombing the middle east and provoking wars and color revolutions near Russia then worldwide oil markets would probably stabilize quite a bit, but as I said earlier, that probably isn’t going to happen.

Like the tariff issue, this one is hard to judge because it requires Trump and Vance to do something difficult and complicated. Nevertheless, if they start to shift the energy rhetoric toward stability rather than driving prices down, that would be a sign they are serious. Within two years I think it should be possible to evaluate the Trump-Vance energy policy by whether they adopt some kind of mechanism to decouple domestic oil and gas production from a boom-bust price cycle, and by whether prices actually remain relatively stable.

Firing federal workers

Trump and his boy-wonder DOGE sidekicks Elon and Vivek have made a lot of idiotic statements about cutting the federal budget by firing huge numbers of people. My most constructive suggestion is to start with the National Endowment for Democracy. That’s the CIA sponsored organization that funds anti-democratic “color revolutions” in countries all over the world and was substantially responsible for starting the Ukraine war. If Trump and Vance actually succeeded in eliminating the National Endowment for Democracy, I would consider becoming a late-stage MAGA convert myself. Not because of the modest direct cost savings, but because it would reduce U.S. war-mongering and support for terrorism abroad. Unfortunately, I don’t think that is what will happen.

Instead, the DOGE rhetoric lends itself to stunts that will not bring any net benefit to the working class. Many federal programs are distributed around the country, especially the ones that deliver federal benefits. Cutting those jobs will disproportionately hurt employment and government services in low-tax red states that don’t have much in the way of state-level programs to pick up the slack. Elon and Vivek can undoubtedly find a few offices full of DC wokesters to sacrifice, but that’s just another stunt. It won’t have a big impact on the budget, much less an impact on material conditions for the working class.

Based on summary numbers at federalpay.org, most federal employees (around 3 million) are associated with the Department of Defense, which Trump fans are stereotypically supposed to support. The next two biggest departments are the departments of veterans’ affairs (over 400,000) and Homeland Security (over 200,000). Again, big cuts to these departments are not likely to play well with Trump fans, and the number of Homeland Security employees will need to go up, not down, if Trump is serious about deporting large numbers of people.

The Department of Education, a favorite target of Republicans even before Trump, only has a little over 4,000 employees. The department has a $45 billion budget, but most of that is pass-throughs to local schools to pay for things like special education. Anything that interferes with those pass-throughs will not ultimately play well in rural areas that have no funds for such luxuries other than federal dollars.

It is also important to remember that a $100,000 a year job in Washington DC might not be considered all that great, but it looks pretty darn good in Wichita. At the end of the day, the biggest thing the working class cares about is the availability of living wage jobs. Cutting many of the best-paid and most secure jobs throughout the country does not provide an immediate net benefit to the working class, it mostly just provides cover for giving more tax-cuts to the rich. As we know very well by now, those tax cuts do not trickle down in ways that provide stable job opportunities for the working class.

It may be theoretically possible to improve the economy by making the federal government more efficient, but it is fiendishly difficult to do in practice. I don’t see how this promise is likely to produce any material benefit for the working class in a four-year time frame. The most likely positive tell here could be if the Trump-Vance administration appears to ghost this promise and do very little. Highly visible stunts with chainsaws are more consistent with the null hypothesis that Trump and Vance intend to continue the kayfabe of the existing uniparty scam.

Legalizing marijuana

This is an easy one. Trump toyed with this issue during the campaign, but did not commit. If Trump and Vance are really serious about doing something for the working class, they need to not only legalize marijuana at the federal level, they also need to erase past prosecutions and allow those convicted to rejoin polite society and qualify for decent jobs. There is probably no other step on this list that could boost the short-term economic viability of the working class of all races more cost-effectively than an aggressive marijuana legalization policy. I don’t think this will happen, but if it does then it counts as a serious material benefit for the working class, not just a stunt.

Promoting alternatives to the college path

This is an issue that Trump did not campaign on at all as far as I could see, but Trump often points to academia as an example of everything that his followers believe is wrong with America. Telling young people that college is the only path to economic prosperity basically reinforces the power of the PMC, which is the real base of the Democratic party today and is Trump’s main enemy.

Trump hasn’t made any promises about this and I don’t think anybody has any particularized expectations, so the field is wide open. Pushing trade schools (assuming you can find some that aren’t scams) would help, and would also help fill the open jobs if undocumented immigrants in the construction industry disappear from the labor market, or if re-shoring of industry starts to happen on any scale. Increasing the size of the military (or developing an immigration enforcement army) is a possibility, but that takes a big budget, and only works if more people want to join. Making a play to co-opt unions might help, but only if the oligarchs will allow it.

In the long run, even if Trump and Vance consolidate their gains among working class voters, they have a serious problem with exercising power so long as the PMC retains a stranglehold on post-secondary education. Going to college is widely believed to be the only path to prosperity in this country, and college graduates are hired to manage all of our major institutions. If the Trump-Vance administration figures out a way to break the iron grip of college on our culture and our economy, then a substantially bigger realignment is possible.

What about the Democrats?

Frankly, the Democrats are irrelevant to the question of whether Trump and Vance will consolidate a working class realignment in the next four years. Anybody who was paying attention figured out long ago that Democrats “represent” the American working class in about the same way a slave auctioneer represents slaves, and the Democrats have sold their working class constituencies down the river for thirty years without pause.

The Biden senility scandal has driven home just how useless and dishonest the Democrats are, and they are not going to be able to pick themselves up off the mat in the next couple of years without help from the Republicans. Even among the PMC, the core constituency of the Democrats for the past two decades, it has become impossible to conceal the foul smell emanating from the Democratic corpse. Former Democrats among the PMC are increasingly labeling themselves “centrists” or some similar poppycock, rather than risk continuing their affiliation with the Democrats.

The credibility of the Democratic party is completely shot at every level, and Democrats are not in control of whether it can ever be regained. The only way the Democrats have a chance in 2026 and 2028 is if Trump and Vance blow it. That could certainly happen, but it won’t be the result of anything the Democrats do between now and then. Instead, the Democrats will probably carry on with their most important role of blocking and tackling for the oligarchs by using dirty tricks and litigation to prevent any viable third party from emerging. That will leave the field completely open for Trump and Vance. We’ll see what happens as a result.

1. Musa al-Gharbi recently published a book that I’m very excited about – I‘ll probably read the book over the holidays and if it lives up to expectations, the review will jump the queue and appear before a bunch of other things I’m working on.