Published in Medium April 26, 2024.
“I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.”
Donald Trump made this statement in early 2016, a few months before he became the GOP’s nominee for president. At the time most media outlets considered his remarks, along with many of his vulgar statements as insults to the intelligence of his supporters. Today, history is repeating itself as he seems to be the clear GOP presidential nominee for 2024, but what would have been an insult in 2016 has become a badge of honor for a party that behaves more like a cult under the spell of a diabolical leader than one that upholds the virtues of democracy.
Today, MAGA is no longer on the fringe of the political spectrum. In addition to solidifying its presence among the blue-collar working class, it has captured the hearts and minds of the more moderate republicans — the white-collar, college-educated constituents who did not necessarily vote for Trump in 2016. It has also transformed Congress into a dysfunctional body forcing many moderates on both sides of the political isle to exit the political arena. The rise of MAGA as the new face of the GOP is the culmination of a movement that began over four decades ago. This piece provides a critical cultural analysis of this large wave of change showing how we got here and how a second Trump term may spell the end of the rule of law and the dawn of illiberal democracy.
A robust and open culture is a complex system that has its own unique lifecycle in a series of cycles that are progressive and evolutionary in nature, but a second Trump term represents the crash-and-burn phase to the current lifecycle and its worldview that began in the early 1980s. It has operated as a zombie system that has outlasted its useful life for the last decade and half. The early 1980s were the beginning of an era that ushered in a new paradigm, a large wave cultural and economic cycle that viewed government as the enemy of the capitalist system and by extension, of individual freedoms enshrined in the constitution. It had two ideological fathers: Ronald Reagan and economist Milton Friedman and together they ushered in an era that replaced the ethos of big brother knows best that had defined US politics and economic policies since the end of WWII with thefree market knows best that has sidelined the role of government regulation in favor of market self-regulation. In my work with large-wave socioeconomic systems, I call this the Only Money Matters cycle, a theme coined by Freidman to capture what matters most in his ideology known as monetarism. It is this narrative that spread the fallacy that regulatory functions can be replaced by the self-regulating forces of the free market that still dominates the worldview of the GOP and a large swath of the Democratic party today.
The gradual disappearance of power from government institutions is a slippery slope. A resilient culture is one that honors the rule of law as an essential layer in cultural development, the indispensable foundation stone of Democratic rule. But, when regulation in the economic sector is viewed as the enemy of thriving capitalist culture, then the systemic disappearance of the rule of law becomes the subconscious goal of the whole system. It represents the erosion of multiple regulatory structures that empower the system to gather inertia towards a certain tipping point. The closer it moves towards that point, the more difficult it becomes to stop or reverse its direction. With the passage of time, the disappearance of regulation spreads to other government institutions making the entire system vulnerable to opportunist and predators whose actions become less detectable. This is how the power of government and its institutions become systemically ineffective through careful, strategic, and deliberate long-term pacification. Unlike fragile democracies that quickly fall to autocrats and dictators, it took the US four decades of chipping away at every aspect of the rule law that brought us to where we are today; on the cusp of electing a self-professed dictator.
The lifecycle graph below, is from my work on the rise and fall of complex systems. It is holonic in nature and can be used to represent the lifecycle of smaller systems, such as economic and political ideologies. A socioeconomic system that offers optimum benefit to its citizenry, must remain within the growth and maturity phases of its lifecycle for as long as possible. The job of economists, regulators, central bankers, business leaders, politicians and community leaders is to make sure the system stays within the bounds of these two phases until its virtues are exhausted and a new, higher order ideological cycle takes over. When that happens, the rule of law evolves to accommodate the rise of the new cycle. This is what keeps our government institutions resilient and our culture in an open psychosocial state and on the leading edge of evolution. It is a partnership between all stakeholders, not the least of which is a lean government that regulates wisely and must remain resilient in order to evolve its regulatory structures that keep the system healthy. Without that dynamic interaction, the system moves past its tipping point where its virtues become calcified and more detached from the needs of its citizenry. Eventually its ideas become exhausted and bankrupted leading to its collapse.
A democracy under a capitalist system is a complex adaptive system with its own lifecycle stages. During its growth and maturity phases, it must take in new input from its environment and dissipate outdated ideas and values to its environment to remain in a viable state. If it moves past its tipping point without input from most stakeholders and in absence of vigilant government institutions, the system fails to yield to the next higher order system and begins to break down. Past that point, there are a million possibilities on how the system could reorganize. It takes on a Darwinian form where only the strongest survive. But unlike natural systems, in human-built systems if there is absence of strong institutions and effective regulatory structures, the bottom falls out, and there is little left that ensures the culture’s upward evolutionary movement. The system is stripped from higher adaptability and resilience, and strength mutates in favor of opportunists and predators.
Any attempts to restore the system at this stage only add to its toxicity as the culture moves forward into a state of chaos that can last for decades. Social and political unrest become the new norm, economic disparities increase and fringe ideologies grow as the corrosive effects of the system slowly creep towards the point of entropy. That is a stage that no liberal democracy should ever reach. It is where the normal evolutionary trajectory of many past lifecycles ends and the new Orwellian system is born from its ashes. It transforms what remains of the system’s regulatory structures into corrupt institutions where social expression defaults to two primary dynamics: predator vs prey and opportunist vs victim.
The lifecycle model I use to gauge the evolution of socioeconomic and sociopolitical systems is based on a larger cultural development model called Spiral Dynamics. Dr. Don E. Beck who conceived the model along with Elza Maalouf and me further developed it into an evolutionary sociopolitical model in our work at the Center for Human Emergence Mideast. Its adaptation to democratic rule is shown in the table below.
Democracy is born at the fourth stage of human and cultural development. It is the stage that ensures the fairness of political ideologies whether its capitalism, communism or socialism. It does so by keeping predatory and opportunist behavior in check. The stages above that transcend and include this stage in its evolved expression, but may not abandon its basic virtues that ensure institutional presence and the rule of law. The higher stages only evolve the content of the rule of law that informs the institutions. Here’s a general theory guide on which stage of cultural development predatory and opportunist behaviors fall into in a capitalist system like the US:
1. Predatory behavior is most identified with the third stage of human sociopolitical development, the ego in its raw form, guiltless, destructive and blood-thirsty. It thrives on instant gratification and the values of might-makes-right. This is barbaric behavior in its modern political form. It seeks to destroy everything that stands in its way, but lacks the capacity, temperance and knowledge to rebuild. Think of a world run by the mob and you have a good picture of what this stage of development is all about.
2. Opportunist behavior falls into the fifth stage of sociopolitical development, a far smarter set of values that work on the long-term manipulation of the entire system, all done from behind the scenes. No blood and gore, just white-collar crime that bankrupts investors, makes people lose their homes, and causes economic disparities over the long term. Think of investment bankers who caused the 2008 financial crisis that brought the entire global economy close to collapse. More recent examples are those of Elizabeth Holmes, CEO of Theranos and Sam Bankman-Fried, CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX. These highly manipulative and opportunist virtues provide continuous examples of how this stage of development evades detection by regulators. Both Holmes and Bankman-Fried engaged in a multi-year, multi-billion-dollar fraud from the comfort of their C-suites and were only caught after whistle blowers sounded the alarm. As part of its long-term strategy, the fifth stage also funds conservative thinktanks that confirm its biases. It works from behind the scenes to influence policymaking by helping elect politicians and judges to ensure the disempowerment of regulation in all branches of government as its long-term systemic goal.
3. Regulatory behavior. The stage of development that regulates the behavior of both of these stages, is the fourth stage that, by necessity must remain robust and intuitive. This is where power moves from the bloody hands of men in the third stage and becomes vested in institutions that uphold the rule of law. It must punish those with the mob mentality and keep them on the straight and narrow. This stage represents the foundation stone of a functioning democracy with a robust legal system. Without it the world becomes a collection of Banana republics and failed states. It must also be smart enough to detect white-collar crime and be able to stem opportunist behavior before it becomes systemically disruptive. The presence of modern-day, robust institutions at this stage of cultural development is the single most important stakeholder that determines the degree of fairness, equality and opportunity in society.
In 2009, I used the overarching themes of each of these three stages as a guide for a research project that eventually became part of my 2013 book MEMEnomics, The Next Generation Economic System. I wanted to determine the long-wave, political, macroeconomic and cultural changes that led to the 2008 financial crisis. My colleagues and I used a computer model that mined 1,068 news reports from business journals and year-end business summary statements covering changes in macroeconomic conditions from 1982 to 2008. We used key terms proprietary to each stage in determining factors such as increases or decreases in white-collar crimes, the deregulation of certain economic sectors and its relationship to the outsourcing phenomenon and its effects on income disparity. We also looked at the relationship between the number of law enforcement employees charged with investigating white-collar crimes and the number of cases that were brought to court, and a handful of other variables. The correlation between the three stages as a representation of the socioeconomic expression leading up to the financial crisis is shown in the graph below. The findings are overlaid on a chronological representation of the lifecycle model.
The composition of the socioeconomic expression from 1975 to 1980 is indicative of how the previous cycle was dominated by the presence of autocratic regulation (the vertical space between the red and the blue lines). It kept the third stage (the space between the x axis and the red line) and the fifth stage (the space between the blue line and the orange line) from becoming predatory and opportunist. However, too much regulation in any system can make it bureaucratic and punitive. In a capitalist society, this fourth stage, without having the proper checks and balances can run amuck repressing innovation, killing the entrepreneurial spirit and causing entire industries to lose their competitive edge. This is what caused the old cycle to end and gave rise to the new cycle that sought the systemic deregulation of the US economy. The new cycle reached its growth and maturity phases during the Clinton administration. This was a time when the rule of law became smart and functional instead of punitive and bureaucratic, striking a healthy balance between the three stages that allowed for robust economic growth while at the same time forging a collaboration among all stakeholders that kept the system in its optimum state.
With the election of George W. Bush, there was no guarantee that the ideal state of deregulation will stop at the healthy stage where the Clinton administration left it. After the attacks of 9/11 Bush looked to avoid a recession and needed an inexpensive way to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That was when the Federal Reserve Bank was forced to lower interest rates to record levels, opening the floodgates for unregulated banking and investment activities. As this massive amount of unregulated capital went through their own lifecycles, it culminated in the 2008 financial crisis. This was a historically crucial stage for our government, a golden opportunity to enact new smart rules that would have revived its role as a critical stakeholder in a fair and functioning democracy. It all came down to the type of conditions it would have set for its massive bailout of banks and insolvent institutions. In other words, it would have either brought the current system back into its maturity phase, or it would have been the catalyst that propelled us to the next large-wave cycle, which would have been in harmony with the merits of the Obama administration. Absent those conditions, the system would move past its tipping point towards its decline and entropy phases.
But alas, in the face of a political system dominated and controlled by investment bankers and Wall Street lobbyists neither Bush nor Obama could enact effective regulation. The officials who orchestrated the bailout for Bush, like his Treasury Secretary, Hank Paulson were previous investment bankers very capable of manipulating the political system to their advantage. President-elect Obama tried to tip the system back into balance by picking Paul Volcker, a past chairman of the Fed who brought inflation under control in the early 1980s. Volcker knew exactly which laws needed to be restored to the banking industry in order to prevent the system from going into its decline phase. But under pressure from Wall Street lobbyists and the banking industry, Obama replaced Volcker with Larry Summers, the quintessential representative of the free market knows best ethos. To save face with the voter, in 2010 the Obama administration passed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. It created the Volcker Rule, a watered-down version of Volcker’s reform proposals that sought to separate activities of investment banks from commercial banks and bring an end to the too big to fail phenomenon.
Dodd-Frank also created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) which was charged with stopping predatory and opportunist acts against consumers. Since the law was passed, both the Volcker Rule and CFPB have been attacked mercilessly by lobbyist for the banking industry and the GOP. By 2020, the Federal Reserve Bank completed the hollowing of the Volcker rule and rolled back most of its provisions. The CFPB suffered even a worse fate as the legality of its funding mechanism and its independence from Congress became the subject of persistent industry lawsuits and repeated calls from the GOP to tame or delegitimize its powers.
This is just an example of how the erosion of the regulatory fourth stage continued past the financial crisis and weakened what remained of institutional presence in our democracy. The dotted lines on the graph represent an extension of how the systemic “dance” between the three different stages continued since the cycle passed its tipping point in 2008. This is where it became a zombie system as the regulatory fourth stage was hollowed and rendered ineffective. This is also where the predatory third stage began to work in lockstep with the opportunist fifth stage to ensure that regulation — all regulation — remained weak. This happens on automatic as the system becomes increasingly out of touch with its stakeholders, spreading toxicity to government institutions and transforming their virtues into an extension of the predatory and opportunist stages. The entire system at this stage becomes immune to any efforts to restore the powers of the regulatory stage like those undertaken by the Biden administration. As the cycle reaches its entropy phase, absent any meaningful presence of the fourth stage, it collapses to a lower order system that permanently owns the political class. It replaces the ethos of the free market knows best with the predatory ethos of Robber Barons, criminals, bigots, thieves and racists know best.
In 2016, Donald Trump represented the rise of the third stage of human development into the modern-day political arena, a dangerous anomaly under the Functional Democracy model. His virtues fall into the same stage of development as those of thugs and mobsters. This might have been the reason why the media and the world dismissed his electability then. Since 2016 he has singlehandedly spread the virtues of this stage through the MAGA movement and beyond. He has legitimized criminal and destructive behavior. His blood thirsty followers prey on citizens who speak ill of him and his movement. He takes pride in thumbing his nose at the rule of law and has implanted these virtues into the subconscious of the American political right. He did it all with the quiet nod from the opportunists in the fifth stage. The two had become an inseparable and unholy alliance that is hell-bend on conquest and destruction. Maybe that explains why the entire GOP looks the other way when he says: “If we don’t win this election, I don’t think you’re going to have another election in this country… It will be a bloodbath.”
