Searching for the trees in the wood, Or: A reply to Adam Tooze's Trumpite futurism

Sun 11 May 2025

"But in solidarity’s more sublime register, a group or individual gazes outward, reaching past similarity toward something more capacious. A solidarity aiming at transformational change — the horizon toward which solidarity must now, of necessity, be directed — demands we not just recognize and sympathize with the plight of others but also join them as equals, reaching across differences without erasing them. Solidarity in its sublime form shatters the boundaries of identity, connecting us to others even when we are not the same."

—Astra Taylor, One for All: To avert global catastrophe, we urgently need to resurrect the ancient ideal of solidarity

About a month ago Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor published an essay in The Guardian about what they perceive connects the far-right politics across the world: a shared understanding amongst alt-right conservatives, libertarian technofeudalists and evangelicals that the immediate future will see the end times approach for which they have to prepare in order for their own to survive. A vision of the future that ostensibly lacks a future. Thus, in contrast to 20th century fascism that saw a similar alliance spread across society but, so Klein and Taylor argue, still saw a pastoral future for their kind after the troubles of the now, this new, 21st century fascism has no belief in a beautiful tomorrow. What we are witnessing now is, as they dub it, end-time fascism.

It's a thought-provoking polemic that highlights a particular zeitgeist while simultaneously explaining what ideology holds the diverse groups of the contemporary right together - in the US from MAGA proles to the richest people on earth and from alt-right populists to patriarchal evangelicals, and similar pairings in other parts of the world like India, Turkey or many countries within the EU. Last week, Columbia University professor of history, publicist and person of leftist worship Adam Tooze offered a reply (spread across two posts) in his substack. To my surprise, his reply was not building upon Klein's and Taylor's thesis nor was it trying to critically engage with the idea laid out. I can only describe Tooze's reaction as trying to pull the rug under Klein's and Taylor's essay, rejecting it wholecloth out of hand.

This I find fascinating. Why go to all the trouble to write two whole posts, charts and all, just to prove two women writers and their polemic, leftist essay wrong? I've been reading Tooze's substack for a while now and cannot immediately remember him pick apart another person's essay with that much force and across two posts. Let alone a style of text he should have understood better. Pondering that question means understanding his objections.

He himself claims to highlight two aspects that he sees missing from their analysis that, from his view, seem to contradict Klein's and Taylor's point. Clearly, though, Tooze's first objection is that Klein and Taylor are supposedly equating the 21st century fascism in the making by Trump, Musk, Modri, et al. with the historical 20th century fascism of Italy, Spain, Germany and Japan. To be sure, such an equation is indeed problematic if just for the obvious reason that one ventures onto very thin ice comparing something in the now - of which we do not yet know how it will unfold in the end - to something historical that we are able to analyse with hindsight. However, it needs to be pointed out that Klein and Taylor never made the claim that Trumpism and its like is the same as 20th century fascism - except to call 21st century far-right agitation fascist. As in: it bears resemblance. Surely, neither is it surprising nor is it unwarranted that people call Trumpism fascist in character. Even Tooze himself tried to understand Trump's action by comparing his political actions with 20th century fascism!¹

Tooze then questions why Klein and Taylor have eschewed Trump's trade policy, presuming that they must have found it "too mundane even to incorporate" despite, as he claims, that issue being the one "aspect of Trumpism that obsesses the mainstream commentariat". He argues his point by referring to Jonathan White's claim that "an effective politics of the future does three things: [a] It provides a vantage point of critique, [b] it constitutes collectivity, [c] it mobilizes that collectivity for sacrifice, through commitment. Believing in a collective future makes you willing to make sacrifices now." He then proceeds to give reasons on how Trump's trade policy commits to all three of these constituting factors.

Nevermind that the first two points are always true of any kind of politics and therefore tell us nothing, the third one seems interesting. Tooze argues: "what is truly original about the Trump-Vance project is that it not only rejects the neoliberal past and summons the spirit of blue collar America, it does so with a rhetoric of sacrifice. For the first time we have an American politics that actually talks about getting by with less." I find this argument unconvincing because (1) it's unclear why sacrifice or commitment should be an indicator for a "politics of the future"² and (2) it is plain wrong that the Trump-Vance project is supposedly the first politics rejecting neoliberalism, summoning the blue-color past and calling for sacrifice all at the same time: for example, Degrowth as a concept has existed for a long time³ and given how the US commentariat was practically foaming at their mouth at the Green New Deal proposed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Edward Markey it is difficult to agree with Tooze here. One could levy the counterargument that Trump-Vance - in contrast to Degrowth or the Green New Deal - actually managed to rally people behind their cause. But that then raises the question if they actually achieved that because or in spite of their economic policies. Besides, Tooze here confuses the self-determined, bottom-up kind of commitment of social movements Jonathan White describes in his article, from which Tooze is citing, with the directed, top-down hierarchical demand for commitment Trump and Vance are employing. When Trump and his ilk tell people about hard times it is a danger siren for vulnerable people first and foremost, as they will bear the brunt of the burden, not a cause for cheers for MAGA hats who are desperately looking forward to finally afford less when going to the supermarket. In this light, Tooze fails to explain how Trump's trade and economic policy are an example for a politics of the future.

Even putting all of that aside, Tooze's retort to Klein and Taylor leaving out this key aspect of Trump's political agenda is meant to show that Trump indeed has a vision of a future and would thus undermine the thesis put forth by the two writers. But Klein and Taylor do not leave out Trump's trade policy! Sure, they are not explicitly calling it out, but it neatly fits into the list compiled in their paragraph pertaining to end-times fascism's second job: "for the US government to lay claim to whatever resources its protected citizens might need to get through the tough times ahead. Maybe it’s Panama’s canal. Or Greenland’s fast-melting shipping routes. Or Ukraine’s critical minerals. Or Canada’s fresh water. We should think of this less as old-school imperialism than super-sized prepping, at the level of the national state. Gone are the old colonial fig leaves of spreading democracy or God’s word – when Trump covetously scans the globe, he is stockpiling for civilizational collapse."

For someone like Tooze who by his own admission struggles as all the other members of the mainstream commentariat to explain without sane-washing Trump's trade and foreign policy agenda, Klein and Taylor's argument that Trump's brutish diplomatic and economic behaviour is first and foremost interested in prepping for the end times at a national level should at least come as an interesting avenue of thought. As an example, remember how Trump suspended his one-sided tariffs on Canada and Mexico when both countries agreed to spend more on policing their US-borders, which in particular meant buying more US weapons? In fact, I doubt that Klein and Taylor would argue that Trump's "blue-collar nation" is retrofuturism at all, as the re-ignition of a home based, mercantalist-style re-industrialisation of the US fits perfectly into the idea of a bunkered nation. Klein and Taylor do not spell it out, but one has to wonder how all the escape homes of the elite are to be serviced and supplied with resources if not for a legion of impoverished proles living outside the walls of the gated gardens.

In his second post, Tooze tries to contradict Klein's and Taylor's thesis by highlighting, of all things, Elon Musk's business genius. For the two writers, Musk too is representative of the end-times fascist movement except he - in contrast to all the others named in their essay, like Thiel or Vance - displays a secular version of the otherwise Christian millenarianism, with their dreams of the rapture and the biblical end of times. For Musk, so Klein and Taylor argue, only unfettered accelerationism of technology can save the human spirit, either in the form of Mars as a secular Ark or by transhumanism that sees us (read: a tiny elite) overcome their mortal toil by uploading their consciousness into computers. In response, Tooze - in a surprising twist for his usual more critical view on Musk - focuses on how Musk's business success should first and foremost be proof for how much he believes in the future. In fact, the success of Tesla - "the fact that Musk did what we in the progressive camp would actually love to be able to do, namely to imbue a physical project of transformation with cultural and political heft [...] who made the mass produced, battery powered EV not only real, but cool, and, for a time at least, even profitable" - must be seen as a corporate populism, or rather: a libertarian-corporate vision of the future only as of yet bound by liberal-progressive laws. In the same way too, Tooze claims, must SpaceX and Starlink be interpreted, as Musk "transforming the economics and politics of space launch and satellites". Something that, as Tooze says about Trump and Musk, "Green New Deal advocates never dared to be: A direct challenge to prevailing norms of American consumerism in the name of a better future."

Let us set aside for a moment that it is plainly not true and a case of US American solipsism that Tesla single-handedly made EVs cool, real and profitable. As Tooze's own graphic shows, since 2016 Chinese consumers bought more EVs than the rest of the world combined - what the graphic sadly does not show is that most of these were domestically produced EVs, not Teslas. In 2018, more than one million EVs were sold in China with foreign cars only making about 6% of the market. Let us also put aside that Musk's ability to launch as many rockets into space and deploy as many private satellites was also only possible because of his virtually endless capital as the richest person on earth and should, therefore, maybe rather be interpreted as a result of one man controlling too much wealth than as a rehash of the techno-genius saviour myth where one man simply had the right idea at the right time in his parents' garage. This is exactly what Klein and Taylor mean when they paint the picture of Musk staring at the night sky and only seeing space to exploit. Whether it is actually helpful long-term (as in, in the future) to humankind to have that many satellites - which will sooner or later fail or be decommissioned - in our planet's orbit is an entirely different topic altogether. A problem not unlike that of high radioactive waste and one that already has a history of long-term problems.

What I find curious is that Tooze does exactly what he criticises Klein and Taylor of doing: focussing on one aspect of Musk's actions and ignoring all others. For what of his dreams of colonising Mars or of overcoming the human-computer threshold? Are all of these just great business ideas waiting to be fulfilled in Musk's quest to transform the economics and politics of the world? Tooze seems to certainly think so, otherwise his rebuttal focussing on Elon Musk's business genius makes little sense.

Tooze's arguments in both of his posts hinge on the idea that contrary to the thesis put forth by Klein and Taylor, Trump, Musk and all the other figures named do indeed have an idea of a future only that that future does not align with the future Klein and Taylor imagine. Moreover, he claims that the Trumpist vision of the future is simply more successful than that of the non far-right, that Klein and Taylor are seemingly jealous of the far-right's success. Or to say it in Tooze's own words, we are witnessing the "embarrassment for advocates of the Green New Deal and Bidenomics [which] is that in pursuit of their visions of the future, Trump’s national economic strategists are far bolder in what they demand of the American public than their opponents in the Democratic party ever were. "

An unfavorable read of Tooze would interpret this as gloating. That the parliamentary US left (however he would define it) just was not able to create a convincing and bold vision of the future and is now bitter and embarrassed at seeing their rival so forcefully do what they could not. A favorable read would have to question why he thinks it is apt to lump the US Green New Deal and Bidenomics together into the same mold of US Democrat partisan politics in the first place. As if both are mirror images of one another and that the only alternative to Trumpian conservatism is whatever the US Democratic party is able to agree on. As if something like an extra-parliamentary opposition that forms political opinions outside of parliamentary politics does not and cannot exist. As if the two-party political system of the US did not contribute to the rise of Donald Trump as much as it hindered any socialist agenda. Tooze casts a wide net over social democratic (Bidenomics), socialist democratic (Green New Deal) and socialist policies (Degrowth), declares Biden's politics a failure and therefore claims the failure of all leftist (economic) policies, now outshone by the success of Trump and Musk.

This line of inquiry reveals within Tooze's reaction what might truly trouble him. I think it is no mistake that Tooze begins his reply with the exhaustion of the future, rightfully citing Mark Fisher who so compellingly made that point in his writings. But not in the way Tooze intends. For the idea that Fischer's "no future outside of capitalism" would - at the end of capitalism - haunt capitalists the most surely is not a surprising take. Within that reality, wasn't it obvious from the start that the Musks and the Bezos and the Zuckerbergs and the Kochs and the Thiels would undermine any chance a left vision of the future (however radical or minimal it might be) ever had? Unless, of course, it is Tooze who has trouble seeing a future outside of liberal capitalism, i.e. capitalism with democratic, law-based guardrails. He himself beholden to that which haunted Fischer. And because of that he falls into the same trap to blame the US Democrats political inability for the rise of Trump and the far-right.

What Tooze overlooks is that the quite obvious and explicit consequence Klein and Taylor draw from their analysis isn't even interested in the far-right and their techbro allies, it's not even weeping - as Fischer was - after a lost alternative to capitalism or - as Tooze seems to think - only reiterating that the future is lost. The essay is quite explicitly a wake-up call to not believe these end-time fascists that there is no future. Instead they mean to show us possibilities, a future "not of end times, but of better times; not of separation and supremacy, but of interdependence and belonging; not of escaping, but staying put and staying faithful to the troubled earthly reality in which we are enmeshed and bound."

Here we can finally start to answer the question laid out at the very beginning: Why did Tooze dedicate two full pages to haphazardly contradict an essay of two writers - an essay which quite obviously was a polemic, a populist manifest not designed as an academic analysis but a leftist call to action?

A fascinating trick Klein and Taylor pull in their essay is to performatively do what they preach: They quote and cite other people that make similar arguments. Not to simply and academically bolster their claim but to show that they are not alone in their beliefs. That this is a shared struggle and that by working together, we might even find the right words together. This is, fundamentally, how feminists have always worked. By highlighting that community, support and solidarity is constitutional to us as human beings. And that, yes, any vision that does not see us all die on a barren planet, would need to "build an unruly open-hearted movement of the Earth-loving faithful: faithful to this planet, its people, its creatures and to the possibility of a livable future for us all. Faithful to here."

By so harshly and unfavorably criticising Klein's and Taylor's feminist call to rise against end-time fascism (by calling them "embarrassed", "evasive", "unserious", having "far-fetched" ideas, perhaps finding certain topoi "too mundane" to mention, and mistaking "the woods for the trees") he reveals his willingness to commit to any thought experiment that could explain the far-right movements behaviour, as long as it does not venture into a feminist view of the world. As so, so many men in academia and on the left before him, he holds up the flag of progressivism for as long as that does not mean his role in the patriarchy is challenged - as an intellectual authority figure determining what lines of thought are valid and which must be brought down. If the left had ever any culpability in the return of fascism, I think it's obvious it is us men on the left who cannot but reactively talk down and dismiss all the women and other people who are actually on our side. Maybe if we would learn to listen we might find a universe of possible futures.

1. Which he wisely frames as right-wing populism, but explicitly finding parallels between Trump and Mussolini is nothing if not equating Trumpism with 20th century fascism in the sense he criticises Klein and Taylor of doing. ↩︎
2. The argument goes that a willingness for sacrifice in the now hopes for a better situation in the future. However, I don't think that we can or should apply the marshmallow experiment to an analysis of politics. Also not all futures are the same: the hope for economical uplift within the next five years is not the same as to hope that my children's children will live as well as if not better than I am right now. ↩︎
3. Going at least as far back as the Club of Rome and thus even predates neoliberalism. ↩︎