The method in Trump's madness
How the idea of a "dual state" helps explain America's slide into fascism
"For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law"
—Oscar R. Benavides
A few weeks back I republished a piece from last year in which I set out how I thought Trump’s creation of concentration camps—any sort of holding facility for people deemed as “illegals”—would play out.
My point was that such facilities create a post-judicial space in which “enemies of the state” can be dealt with without needing to go through all the usual legal protections of due process and a fair trial. I noted that “Hitler’s Germany may be the extreme case, but that extremity allows us to clearly see the outlines of how the process works and so considering that history will help us see what Trump has in store.”
The central point I was making was that the post-legal climate created inside the camps rapidly came to infect the political and social climate outside the camps. The network of concentration camps—not just the death camps in which the Holocaust was enacted, but the massive network of labour camps across the Reich—become a perfect microcosm of Nazi Germany itself.
I want to delve into that idea a little more deeply in regard to Trump’s America. Again, I’ll acknowledge the risks of drawing historical parallels and happily concede that no two circumstances line up perfectly, but I’ll think you’ll find some value in the framework I am describing here.
Pick up sticks
A number of people—Radley Balko and Adam Przeworski amongst them—are doing an incredible job of tracking the changes Trump and Musk are enacting, and all of them note the difficulty of just following along. As Balko writes, “Every day brings a firehose of brazen corruption, mad power grabs and jaw-dropping idiocy….And that of course is the point. Trump aides and allies like Russ Vought, Stephen Miller, and Steve Bannon have said for months that their plan is to overwhelm the press, public, and critics with so much activity that no one can possibly keep up.”
What I was trying to do with the concentration camp post was to find a way of speaking about what is happening in America so that we could see the forest for the trees. I was trying to find an underlying rationale that allows us to step away from the firehose and understand the forces that are giving the moment cohesion. I was trying to explain why the term fascism is appropriate and show that what Trump is doing is much more than implementing a policy platform that people on the left don’t like, or that is some sort of normal variant of conservatism, or even neoliberalism. What he is doing is fundamentally shifting the liberal-democratic fabric of America and, by extension, the world, in a completely authoritarian direction.
This post consolidates that idea with reference to an incredible book that began life in the early years of Nazi Germany itself and that was eventually published when its author, German-Jewish lawyer Ernst Fraenkel, escaped Europe and settled in the United States. The book is called The Dual State: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship and was co-written with Jens Meierhenrich.1
I won’t give you Fraenkel’s full history or explain how the book came to be—just to keep this post to a reasonable length—but by all means do some Googling; it’s worth the investigation.
The book is based on the research and experience that Fraenkl was privy to in real time, from 1933-1939, as the early days of Nazi Germany unfolded, when he was still working (incredibly) as a lawyer under the Nazis in Berlin.2 He (heroically) documented, not just the way in which the Nazi regime undermined the rule of law, but provided a theoretical framework that helped explain the shift towards totalitarianism.3
The Dual State
Fraenkel’s central thesis suggest that Nazi Germany operated as a “dual state” (Doppelstaat), a system split into two coexisting yet contradictory spheres. He calls these the normative state (Normenstaat) and the prerogative state (Maßnahmenstaat). This dichotomy reflected the regime’s simultaneous reliance on bureaucratic legality and arbitrary violence to consolidate power. The key point is “that there is a constant friction between the traditional judicial bodies which represent the Normative State and the instruments of dictatorship, the agents of the Prerogative State.”
The normative state consisted of formal, legal institutions inherited from the Weimar Republic, including courts, administrative bodies, and codified statutes. It functioned as a “technical administration of the law” while preserving the appearance of legal predictability in non-political domains such as commercial law, taxation, and civil disputes.
The prerogative state operated through unchecked arbitrariness, epitomised by the Gestapo and SS. It exercised “unlimited discretionary power” to suppress political dissent, persecute Jews and others deemed “enemies of the state”, and enforce racial policies without legal constraint. Fraenkel argued that this realm functioned as the regime’s “political sovereign,” overriding the normative state whenever ideological or security imperatives demanded. For instance, the 1933 Reichstag Fire Decree suspended civil liberties and enabled preventive detention, institutionalizing the prerogative state’s dominance, and I will say more about that later.
Although I don’t want to hide from the necessity of recognising Trump as fascist and authoritarian, this framework does provide an alternative way of understanding what is happening for those who are uncomfortable with that terminology. Yes, it is predicated on the idea of authoritarian power usurping the rule of law (and democracy) but it contextualises this to show how the slide to dictatorship is not simply imposed with a single blow, but is gradually installed as the Prerogative State (PS) comes to dominate the Normative State (NS).
It also shows that such authoritarianism is never total and thus serves to remind us that even the most brutal regime relies on compliance, a compliance that can ultimately be withheld, though obviously, at great cost.
Fraenkel is arguing that all of law, all of society, is moved—at the whim, ultimately, of the Fuhrer—into the realm of the political. This is the process, the way the tide flows. By politicising everything, the prerogative state insinuates itself—inconsistently but relentlessly—into every corner of life. Citizens no longer have any sort of freedom other than that arbitrarily granted by the state, the party, and the leader (all of which are increasingly merged):
The guiding basic principle of political administration is not justice; law is applied in the light of ‘the circumstances of the individual case,’ the purpose being achievement of a political aim.
The political sphere is a vacuum as far as law is concerned. Of course it contains a certain element of factual order and predictability but only in so far as there is a certain regularity and predictability in the behavior of officials. There is, however, no legal regulation of the official bodies. The political sphere in the Third Reich is governed neither by objective nor by subjective law, neither by legal guarantees nor jurisdictional qualifications. There are no legal rules governing the political sphere. It is regulated by arbitrary measures (Massnahmen), in which the dominant officials exercise their discretionary prerogatives. Hence the expression ‘Prerogative State’ (Massnahmenstaat).
…The official legend which the Third Reich seeks to propagate maintains that the National-Socialist state is founded on valid laws, issued by the legally appointed Hitler Cabinet and passed by the legally elected Reichstag. It would be futile to deny the significance of this legislation in the transformation of the German legal order. …But it should be remembered that on the statute books after February 28, 1933, can be found almost no legislation referring to the part of political and social life, which we have labelled ‘political sphere,’ now outside the sphere of ordinary law. Legislation regarding politics would be futile inasmuch as legal declarations in this field are not considered binding.
I won’t give a full history of the concept of the dual state, but I can’t resist sharing a quote that Fraenkel uses to show the way in which the dual state has its origins in the era of absolute monarchs and their practice of arbitrary rule. The quote comes from James I, uttered on June 20, 1616:
Encroach not upon the prerogative of the Crown. If there fall out a question that concerns my prerogative or mystery of State, deal not with it till you consult with the King or his Council or both; for they are transcendent matters … As for the absolute prerogative of the Crown, that is no subject for the tongue of a lawyer, nor is it lawful to be disputed. It is atheism and blasphemy to dispute what God can do … so it is presumption and high contempt in a subject to dispute what a King can do, or say that a King cannot do this or that.
I mean, Trump did declare himself king the other day, didn’t he?
There is also something of a paradox here in that what I am calling the “dual state” is being enacted in the US via another dictum called the “unitary Executive theory”, a doctrine at the heart of Maga intellectualism. We needn’t pick at this too much. It is enough to recognise that both doctrines enshrine top-down, arbitrary rule, a point nicely made in this article by Harold Meyerson (emphasis added):
One of the most defining and distinctive arguments of the Republican Party—and not just its MAGAnuts—is that the administrative state, the departments and agencies that implement policies and make rules to enforce those policies, is out of control and has to be "drowned in a bathtub," as anti-government activist Grover Norquist has been saying for the past 40 years. More recently, this line of attack has been sharpened into the case for a unitary executive. Its adherents argue that the president should control all the agencies and bureaus that previous Congresses and presidents established to provide bipartisan oversight and a regulatory eye over markets, public health, worker rights, and so on, in furtherance of the laws that broadly structure their work.
No executive has ever sought to be as unitary as our current president, who has already sacked any number of directors, board members, and field workers at such agencies as the National Labor Relations Board, and has sought to abolish outright the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. If there’s rulemaking to be done, or regulations to be lifted, that’s entirely up to Donald Trump.
Fraenkel’s book goes through legal case after legal case where the prerogative state managed to corrupt the normative state as judges and other officials succumbed to political pressure of various sorts. They engaged in the sort of willed compliance people talk about today and Fraenkel documents many instances to make his point. I will cite one to make the general point. It is wild:
[An] Aryan merchant of Wuppertal applied for an injunction against the son of one of his competitors who had damaged his business by spreading rumors to the effect that he was Jewish. The lower court decided for the plaintiff. The defendant then appealed the case, changing his defense by emphasizing that he was a leading officer in the National-Socialist Artisan Guild (N.S.–Hago). The Appellate Court of Düsseldorf (Oberlandesgericht) reversed the decision in favor of the defendant. The court decided that the defendant held public office (N.S.–Hago) and that he had to be dealt with as a public official and that the diffusion of the philosophy of the party (including anti-Semitic propaganda) was therefore strictly in his line of duty. Said the court: ‘An official act is not changed by the fact that an error has been committed or that it constitutes an abuse of official orders. The legality or appropriateness of such political acts cannot be made to depend on the judgment of the courts.’
The complaint was dismissed on grounds based on claims which, by virtue of their political character, are outside the jurisdiction of the courts.
Piece by piece, the pillars of the normative state are dismantled.
It’s the capitalism, stupid
Fraenkel provides a fascinating discussion in the book about the origins of the dual-state concept within religious arguments between positive and natural law, and about the way in which capitalism interacted with the normative and prerogative states in Nazi Germany, driving the dynamic. For reasons of length, I will skip over a discussion of the religious arguments (fascinating as they are) but will linger a minute on the role of capitalism in all this.
Clearly, what is happening in the US is tied closely to the dominance of billionaire capitalism and it is worth highlighting a point that Turkish activist Ece Temelkuran made the other day in an interview with podcaster Andrew Keen. She said that “Nothing is new. And we know how fascism comes to power. We know how fascism operates. It operates in the crisis of the economy, when the powerful and the financially powerful need the support of state power. This is what's happening. It happened in almost the same way in 1930s and now it's happening in a grander, grander scale.”
The role of capitalism is important now, as it was in Nazi Germany, because it helps set the terms of the argument between the normative and the prerogative state. It helps define the tension between order and the rule of law and the arbitrary and political nature of authoritarian, post-judicial rule. Hitler himself was at pains to appease industrialists and in his first Reichstag speech on March 25, 1933, said: “The government will on principle safeguard the interests of the German Nation not by the roundabout ways of a bureaucracy organized by the state but by encouraging private initiative and by recognizing private property.”
Fraenkel notes that “If capitalism wants to remain capitalism, it requires at home a state apparatus that recognizes the rules of formal rationality, for without a predictability of opportunities, without legal certainty (“Rechtssicherheit”), capitalist planning is impossible. Capitalism today demands of the state a double (“ein Doppeltes”): Because capitalism is capitalism, it demands, first, the formally rational order of a technically intact state. Because capitalism is impotent, it demands, furthermore, a state that provides the political supports (“politischen Stützen”) necessary to ensure its continued existence; a state with enemies against which capitalism is allowed to arm.”4
He nonetheless adds that “The National-Socialist state is remarkable not only for its supreme arbitrary powers but also for the way in which it has succeeded in combining arbitrary powers with a capitalistic economic organization.”
In a Preface to the book, Fraenkel’s coauthor notes that “Fraenkel was convinced that Germany’s capitalists sacrificed the well-being of the Nazis’ real and imagined enemies on the altar of economic accumulation. As he put it, borrowing Marxist terminology, ‘the dual state is the ideological superstructure (Überbau) of a capitalism that thrives on politics because it is unable to exist any longer without politics’.”
Clearly Trump is engaged in the same sort of juggling act, with the billionaires engaged in similar sacrificial acts, and we are yet to see how these tensions might play out or how far the sacrifices will go. There are so many parallels in how the US is currently reorganising itself, and I can’t help but think of Trump’s comment early in his second term that “Everybody is replaceable, and …we’d love to have them leave. We’re trying to — remember this — we want them to go into the private sector. It’s our dream to have everybody, almost, working in the private sector, not in the public sector.”
Matt Stoller is another observer documenting the changes that are happening, with a particular focus on the economic. He sees a recession coming, but more importantly, he understands that Musk and DOGE are modelling a behaviour that other corporate overlords are looking to mimic.
But CEOs are looking at what Musk did to Twitter, and what he’s doing to the government, and thinking, “why not me?” A host of corporate leaders are now trying to cut their workforce and replace it with AI. In technology, Microsoft is firing people, Meta is getting rid of 5% of its workforce, and HP and Salesforce are following. Layoffs are happening at Google, Autodesk, Blue Origin, Sonos, eBay, Sophos and Intel. In the non-tech economy, UnitedHealth Group’s Optum, Starbucks, and Walgreens, among others, are engaged in mass layoffs. Stanford and Harvard are freezing hiring, as are higher educational institutions across the country.
This dynamic reminds me of how Ronald Reagan fired striking air traffic controllers, which was a green light to corporate America to break unions across the economy. DOGE, for better or worse, is the trend in America.5
The whole notion of “make America great again” is a version of Hitler’s Gemeinschaft ideology, a deeply racially inflected version of volk that has obvious parallels with Trump’s desire for the mass deportation of immigrants. But what Fraenkel notes of Germany in the 30s is also true of America today, that “The present German ideology of Gemeinschaft (‘community’) is nothing but a mask hiding the still existing capitalistic structure of society.”
In this sense, he argues, that dual state is a mere symptom of a larger tendency. “The root of the evil lies at the exact point where the uncritical opponents of National-Socialism discover grounds for admiration, namely in the community ideology and in the militant capitalism which this very notion of the Gemeinschaft is supposed to hide. It is indeed for the maintenance of capitalism in Germany that the authoritarian Dual State is necessary.”
I am not so sure the “maintenance of capitalism” needs to be so well hidden today, and Trump’s version of it reverses many of the presumptions of free-market globalisation.
Stoller says that he “can imagine a world where a lot of people get radicalized and angry as things break, and rebuild an argument for public governance. Or I can imagine a world of where government has turned over tax collection, most government spending, highways, the global positioning system, the post office, the FAA, weather data, much of the military, and all research to a small number of monopolists. And frightened citizens, shellshocked, just don’t know what to believe or who to trust as it happens.”
Fraenkel argues that the “Dual State lives by veiling its true nature,” but really, we in the West have been having this basic argument—the one Stoller sets out—for the duration of the neoliberal period and the neoliberals have convincingly won. The shellshock he highlights is because the veil has dropped: Trump and Musk are going mask-off.
For the capitalists too, it must be said, and it remains to be seen the extent to which they “discover grounds for admiration”. Who will need whom the most?
To manage the shellshock, though, let’s continue to organise our thoughts and at least see as clearly as possible what we are up against.6
The Enabling Act
The Enabling Act (Ermächtigungsgesetz), which passed the Reichstag on March 23, 1933, granted Hitler the authority to pass laws without parliamentary approval, suspend civil liberties, and override constitutional constraints. As Fraenkel explains it:
Three acts of President Hindenburg between January 30 and March 24, 1933, helped National-Socialism into the saddle: the appointment of Hitler to the post of Reichs-Chancellor, the proclamation of civil siege by issuing the Reichstag Fire Decree and the signing of the Enabling Law of March 24, 1933. Two of these acts could scarcely have been avoided, but the third was entirely voluntary. The appointment of Hitler, the leader of the strongest party, to the post of Reichs-Chancellor was in conformity with the Weimar Constitution; historically, the proclamation of a state of ‘civil’ instead of military siege subsequent to the Reichstag fire was the decisive act of Hindenburg’s career. It was the necessary consequence of the instigated coup d’état (based on the Reichstag Fire Decree), when Hindenburg signed the law of March 24, 1933, and thus sounded his own death knell.
Endowed with all the powers required by a state of siege, the National-Socialists were able to transform the constitutional and temporary dictatorship (intended to restore public order) into an unconstitutional and permanent dictatorship and to provide the framework of the National-Socialist state with unlimited powers. The National-Socialist coup d’état resulted from the arbitrary application of the Emergency Decree of February 28, 1933, which made a mandatory dictatorship absolute. The extension and maintenance of this absolute dictatorship is the task of the Prerogative State.
From this flowed the idea of “protective custody”, framed as a measure to protect individuals or society, it was a mechanism that became the cornerstone of state-sanctioned terror, enabling the extrajudicial detention of political opponents, Jews, homosexuals, and other targeted groups.
By 1933, over 100,000 Germans had been imprisoned under this pretext, the beginning of a systematic erosion of civil liberties that would escalate into genocide. Protective custody granted the Gestapo unchecked authority to incarcerate individuals indefinitely in concentration camps. This is why Fraenkel says that “protective custody is not merely incidental to the revolution, disappearing upon the return to normal conditions or being absorbed by the general penal law.”
He then echoes the point I made earlier, that “we may conclude that the concentration camp is not only an essential component in the functioning of the National-Socialist state, but also an indication of the enduring character of the sovereign National-Socialist dictatorship.”
Ultimately, it was about destroying the constitutional basis of the state and Trump is engaged in a similar process, undermining all the liberal norms that go with the US Constitution, however imperfectly they may have been realised in the past.
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
This history should teach us to be alert to any attempt by the Trump Administration to enact some sort of state of emergency, for, as with Reichstag fire and the subsequent Enabling Act, we then enter a condition of martial law. Fraenkel actually notes the constitutional basis for this in the United States and quotes Chief Justice Cockburn, who points out that “‘Martial law, when applied to the civilian, is no law at all, but a shadowy, uncertain, precarious something depending entirely on the conscience, or rather, on the despotic and arbitrary rule of those who administer it.’”
Or as another US jurist put it: “Let us call the thing by its right name; it is not martial law, but martial rule.”
Again—and I stress—the point is not to find exact parallels between Hitler and Trump, but to suggest there is an underlying logic where Trump is exploiting tensions between the normative state and the prerogative state—between the realms of law and politics—which he uses to blur or break norms and laws that hold the liberal state together—that make it a liberal state. He encourages a way of doing and thinking that politicises everything a government would normally do in order to substitute his own will.
I will leave, with much thanks, the further job of documenting the specific changes indicating the turn to fascism to those like Charlie Lewis, who offers his first instalment here. I will also highlight this piece from The Atlantic which is an excellent discussion of the how the tension between the normative and prerogative states is being amplified via the theory of the unitary executive:
“The Trump team came in determined to expand the scope of presidential power,” Don Kettl, the former dean of the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, told me in an email. “Their goal is to stretch the limits of Article II of the Constitution, by using the beginning of the article—that executive power is located in the president of the U.S.—and the take-care clause, to assert that the president has power over all things executive. Congress might pass a law, but once the law is passed, they believe the president ought to have complete control over how it’s implemented.”
But let me also briefly note one particular action by the Trump administration, namely, the February 2025 executive order (EO) called "Ensuring Accountability for All Agencies." Let it be the representative example for the general point I am making.
This EO mandates that independent regulatory agencies submit all regulations to the White House for review, grants the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) authority to withhold congressionally appropriated funds, and designates the president as the sole interpreter of law for federal employees. This directive systematically dismantles the operational independence of agencies like the Federal Reserve and FDIC, which were designed by Congress to function with insulation from partisan pressures. Legal analyst Jackie Singh notes the order’s resemblance to the Enabling Act’s mechanisms, particularly its use of existing legal structures to legitimise executive overreach.
Section 5 of the order requires OMB to align agency activities with presidential priorities, effectively overriding congressional intent in budget allocations, and as Gannon et al note, this particular EO “appears to be the latest in a long line of efforts to make the Executive Branch more responsive to political officeholders.”
Remember, the whole idea of the dual state is predicated on the ability of the executive to render all legal action arbitrary, subjected entirely to the whims and wishes of the President. The prerogative state drowns the normative state in a bathtub of Presidential unpredictability.
Violence
I hope I have made my point by now, and as we finish this long discussion, let me remind you what is at stake. I hate to say this—spoiler alert—but it is likely that none of this ends well. The tensions between the normative and prerogative state are necessarily violent, and at some point—probably at multiple points—the tension will resolve itself in violence. Trump and his henchmen are well aware of this which is why they are reorganising the armed forces, domestic police forces, and the FBI, not to mention empowering various freelance militia groups like the Proud Boys.
Overt violence is almost inevitable.
I was thinking this through the other day when I happened to pop on The Rest is Politics podcast and heard former Conservative MP, Rory Stewart, express very similar views. This is a long extract, but hey, you’ve come this far!
As America gets more authoritarian, it's very tempting to look at Germany and Italy in the 1930s and imagine that what happens is that, as Trump ignores judges, tells the executive not to implement what they say, takes over the FBI and security services, you end up with a very centralized authoritarian government.
But the US is not Germany or Italy in the 1920s and 30s. It's a society with huge divisions and an immense amount of distributed power and opposition.
So [you have] states, California, money [interests], Wall Street, media and almost half the American population, [who are] very, very angry, and as Trump begins to take institutions to pieces, those Americans won't put up with it. They'll push back.
They'll try to push back institutionally. So, you can see they try to push back with judges.
But as Trump begins to get rid of those institutional safeguards, uses his majority in Congress, says, these are Obama's judges, Musk [will] say, we're going to impeach the judges, not going to implement the judges decisions. Then the only route for the opposition is going to increasingly become non-institutional, non-constitutional, because Trump is dismantling the institutions.
In other words, without going all the way on Trump derangement syndrome, I would say that the biggest threat facing the United States over the next four years is not actually authoritarian control, but a society getting increasingly divided and violent as state governors begin to push back and reject federal rules and Trump tries to use force to inflict them on people that don't want them.
And this question of how minorities resist, I don't want to use the word civil war, but that is a risk that we're not talking about enough yet because we're imagining that Trump is always going to win. Things get more dangerous when people oppose.
The whole history of states, particularly those of a totalitarian bent with designs on world domination, move in this direction. Central to all this is the development of new technologies of communication and if our regimes don’t entirely resemble those of the past it is because they organise themselves within different information environments.7 The Cambridge History of Violence (Volume 4) sets it out clearly:
New methods of recording and organising societies, coupled with the advances in communication technologies, allowed all forms of governments – monarchies, democracies, dictatorships and socialists – to extend their violence to larger and larger sections of their populations. Populations, counted and categorised, could be forcibly relocated, corralled in monitored zones, moved into workcamps, or simply executed with a speed hitherto unseen in human history. In Germany and Poland during World War II, somewhere in the region of 8 million Jews and Romas were identified, documented and killed in newly designed facilities that pumped poisonous gas into locked chambers. The work of modern scientists, architects and bureaucrats combined to decimate specific populations in carefully planned strategies that took years to develop but once operationalised were brutal in their efficiency.
Technologies were essential to the deployment of the power of the modern state as that institution held claim to the legitimate use of violence. In the twentieth century, states became killing machines with a reach they had never had before. This required not only machines but dedicated cadres to use them. In the extreme cases – Stalin’s Russia, Hitler’s Germany and Pol Pot’s Cambodia – violence against enemies within and without created the conditions for the stability of the regime itself. Without sequential paroxysms of violence, these regimes would have collapsed. Thus, the modern state came to devour itself.
Edwards, Louise; Penn, Nigel; Winter, Jay. The Cambridge World History of Violence: Volume 4, 1800 to the Present (pp. 2-3). (Function). Kindle Edition.
The whole point of the world order that developed in the wake of World War II was to establish an international system that contained the tendency of states to devolve into prerogative states of arbitrary, politicised rule, and it worked for a while.
As we have slipped away from those norms—and there is no need to tell me that it was always an incredibly imperfect “world order”—especially as we have allowed huge disparities of wealth to distort our democracies, we have opened a space into which a Trump can slip. It has taken decades of hollowing out of liberal institutions but the new communication technologies and the anti-state logic of neoliberalism have allowed us to move towards the sort of dual state Fraenkel documents in his incredible book.
This corruption of the rule of law is not merely a byproduct of authoritarianism but is integral to its functioning, as it allows leaders to maintain control while presenting a facade of legality.
This is the state Trump is building. This is how he is doing it.
At the moment—and this may seem like small compensation—what we must keep front-and-centre in our thinking is that such regimes never last, that they always sow the seeds of their own destruction. The Third Reich lasted a mere 12 years, and there is already evidence that Trump’s dystopia is beginning to crumble. As historian Timothy Snyder noted the other day:
Let’s hope so.
Whatever happens in America, and at whatever pace it unfolds, it will affect us all so let us at least learn from their failures.
For democracy to maintain itself, let alone thrive, power needs to stay as close as it can to the people, to be dispersed across the citizenry, not concentrated in the hands of the few, even within Congresses and Parliaments. The more the political class separates itself from local communities, the more vulnerable the state, or the party, is to being captured by vested interests.
And the more our democracy teeters.
From there, trust between the governed and their representatives collapses, with more spaces opening up that drag in vulnerable groups and convince them that the “strong man” approach to governance is the only one that works.
The more that happens, the more likely the prerogative state will take over.
While I don’t think Australia is anywhere near seeing the normative state collapse under the weight of the prerogative state, there are red flags, and Peter Dutton has made it perfectly clear that he will take us further down the Trump path.
Do not comply in advance.
Fraenkel’s framework of “the dual state” is useful for organising our thoughts about the Trump/Musk regime and for helping us avoid the same mistakes in Australia. For me, it helps clarify the torrent of change that has been unleashed in the United States and provides a useful way of orienting myself without becoming overwhelmed by the horror that is unfolding.
I’ll be interested to hear your thoughts.
The book has mainly been out of print—unforgivably forgotten—though there is now an incredibly expensive Kindle version of it available (which I bought for reading and research purposes). You can also read it free at archive.org (on their admittedly shitty browser).
He escaped to the US in 1939 and the book was first published in 1941.
Worth noting, that “totalitarianism” is a concept Fraenkl is cautious with, the whole point of his argument being that the Nazi regime occupied a kind of political hinterland where it was neither fully one thing nor another, at least in its early years.
Just to make clear, whenever Fraenkel says “today” he means in the period 1933-38. It is constant jolt to realise he writing in the midst of the consolidation of the Third Reich.
For a good discussion of Stoller, see this by James Livingston.
I want to point out that Fraenkel was careful not to be reductionist about the link between Nazism and capitalism. He writes, “There are many people who believe that National-Socialism is, so to speak, nothing but the house-servant of German monopoloy capitalism…. These oversimplified theories tend quite unnecessarily to discredit the economic interpretation of fascism. Such an interpretation should be formulated in terms of far more minute and deeper reaching categories.”
This is a whole other discussion and I am only touching on it here.
It's a sad reflection on US society that, if anything is to stop Trump, it will be the failure of his tariff policy. It's possible that this will go pear-shaped before the dictatorship is properly in place, and that the need to deal iwth economic chaos will throw Trump off-course.
But it's already clear that the entire Republican party is (or will be in due course) cool with mass arrests, murder of political opponents etc. That's half the country and way over half of the white men who represent the default identity/unmarked category of Americans.
We (the free world) need to separate ourselves from this toxic mess as soon as possible, and to make it impossible for domestic Trumpists to separate themselves from what is happening htere, except by repudiating the entire ideology.
Excellent. I admire your tone or demeanor here, because it allows a dispassionate examination of the available evidence with historical analogies in view but not imposed on the contemporary sequence of events. To characterize this kind of rhetorical agility, we used to say, "he wears his learning lightly." It's an expression that applies here. Thanks, Tim.