Pluralistic: America cannot undo Trumpism (09 Nov 2026)

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Originally published at: Pluralistic: America cannot undo Trumpism (09 Nov 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow



Today's links

  • America cannot undo Trumpism: The only way out is through.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: Bruces x Pokemon; Rich countries and WIPO conspire to kill developement agenda; Wired photos go CC; "Mortality Bridge"; Drones over Disney; CBC v podcast apps; Realtor x election eschatology; Right-clicker mentality; "Victories Greater Than Death"; Facebook's fraud files; Zune v Universal; Ben and Jerry's x OWS; Nudging is bunk; History of Chinese sf; How Audi cheated; Trump runs the surveillance state; Stockholm v interop.
  • Upcoming appearances: Courtenay, Vancouver, Folkestone, Oxford, Sheffield, Virtual, Oxford, Santa Barbara, Montreal.
  • Recent appearances: Where I've been.
  • Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Colophon: All the rest.


A pair of wrecked, overturned wagons against a weathered wooden building tinted like a faded US flag; between them is a DEAD END sign. To the left is a 1930s streetcorner with a ONE-WAY sign; entering from that edge is an engraving of an elephant with upraised trunk, decorated in GOP livery and topped with a mop of Trump hair.

America cannot undo Trumpism (permalink)

True Carneyism has never been tried. When Canadian PM Mark Carney traveled to Davos to declare a "rupture" in the old order (and admit that this old order was never that great to begin with) he told us that there was no going back from Trumpism. The only way out of Trumpism was through:

https://www.weforum.org/stories/forum-institutional/davos-2026-special-address-by-mark-carney-prime-minister-of-canada/

This is easy to say, but hard to do. If the old order is over, then we will never again be able to trust America to serve as the world's cop, banker, ISP, IT department and consumer of first resort.

We can't trust Americans to buy the things we make:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/16/k-shaped-recovery/#disenshittification-nations

We can't trust them not to interfere with the interconnections between fiber lines that slither out of the oceans and onto the US landmass:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/26/difficult-multipolarism/#eurostack

We can't trust them not to weaponize the US dollar to undermine sovereign nations' legitimate activities:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/26/i-dont-want/#your-greenback-dollar

And we absolutely can't trust them not to spy on, steal from, and shut down governments, firms and households around the world by cutting off access to US software and cloud services, and by bricking the world's devices, from tractors to smartphones:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition

Despite Carney's assertion that this rupture represents a welcome (if too cruel, sudden and painful) departure of the old (never very good) system, no one (not even Carney) is acting like the world has truly changed. Take Carney's answer to the Trump tariffs: retaliatory tariffs. Tariffs have a place in sheltering a nascent domestic industry from better-developed, deeper-pocketed foreign competitors, so a tariff wall between Canada and the US could make sense, if it was paired with the massive domestic investment we'd need to rebuild the manufacturing industry that Brian Mulroney sold out with the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement (and later NAFTA).

But Carney is no Carneyist. When it comes to massive domestic spending, Carney is a bog-standard, austerity-addled Reaganomics guy; a central banker and technocrat whose idea of "industrial policy" is firing tens of thousands of skilled civil servants who thwart his agent and replacing them with defective (but obedient) chatbots running on US hardware:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/13/vibe-governance/#k-hole

Carney's retaliatory tariffs aren't what you'd do if the old order had "ruptured." They're what you'd do if you hoped that your American cousins would come to their senses, evict their mad king from the White House, tear down the Epstein Memorial Ballroom, and roll back the clock to 2016. Like a lot of liberals, Carney just wants to go back to brunch.

But as any true Carneyist knows, brunch is canceled forever. Brunch ruptured. There's no going back to the old America, and there's no going back to the old American order that had dominated the world since the end of WWII. As November Kelly says, "Trump inherited a poker game rigged in his favor, but he flipped the table over anyway because he resented having to pretend to play."

This is something we're all struggling with, including Americans. The Republicans' midterm wipeout has corporate Democrats hoping that after a few years' tinkering, they can elect a Newsomdroid or give Harris a do-over and win back the trust and reliance of the world and the American people. Even for a true Carneyist who never liked the old order very much (like me), this is a comforting prospect. No one knows what the next world will look like, and no matter how screwed up the old world was, I knew how it worked and how to make it work for me (more or less).

But there is no going back. Trump I didn't have a plan, it only had Trump, whose One Big Idea was issuing Executive Orders. Many of these were meaningless bloviating. Some were illegal and were swiftly suspended or never went into effect. Biden overturned nearly all the remaining EOs (that were both substantive and not totally illegal).

But Trump II had Project 2025. The point of Project 2025 and the ambition of the wreckers who wrote it was to push America through a series of one-way transformations that cannot be undone, and that's what's happened, over two short years. That's the bad news. The good news is that it's much easier to destroy than to build, so Project 2025 hasn't led to the creation of permanent, load-bearing fascist institutions that cannot be shuttered without bringing down large parts of the USA.

Start with values. Trumpism is a denial of democracy and the rule of law. Tens of millions of Americans have been marinated in a belief system that says that the way to win power is to claim all the elections you lose are rigged and that these "stolen elections" are best addressed by staging a coup. These people are in a cult that embraces its leader's naked corruption. They're in a cult whose doctrine treats political triumph of as divine direction embark on looting sprees. It's a cult whose members mutilate their faces so that they can't ever leave, and the reward for this permanent disfigurement is endless influence-peddling:

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/6136101-ambassador-guilfoyle-wire-request/

Even without ritual scarification to mark them out forever, millions of these people will never come back from this cult indoctrination. They will forever be democracy's enemies, treating the idea of laws, rules and honest service as shucks for the rubes. What's more, these people's neighbors, family members and co-workers will never be able to fully trust them.

Unfortunately, those values aren't just diffused through the population: they are concentrated in the organs of state. DOGE and Federalist Society judicial appointments have created a stay-behind cadre of life-tenured fascists who now dominate America's federal judiciary and permanent civil service, including and especially the nation's law enforcement and national security agencies, from the FBI to the FDA, the NSA to the Bureau of Prisons.

Worse: DOGE also chased away hundreds of thousands of skilled, principled public servants. Those people have retired, retrained, emigrated or exited the workforce. They can't simply be re-hired and restored to their old roles. From finance regulation to the national education system, America has lobotomized itself, swapping people who understand how things work and use that understanding to enforce the laws and safeguard the American people for end-times fascists, caliper-wielding eugenicists, and Ayn Rand LARPers.

Much of the work DOGE's victims did is also gone forever. When DOGE's muskrats killed long-running NIH research projects, they pulled the plug on studies, some of which had run for decades. Many of these experiments are unsalvageable. DOGE didn't just throw away the contributions that cancer patients, people with genetic disorders and other volunteer research subjects gave to science: in halting these research projects, DOGE shredded this selfless sacrifice. Why not? When one NIH official begged his DOGE invaders not to kill long-running, valuable cancer research, the DOGE child laughed and said it didn't matter, because AI was going to cure cancer.

Then there's the NIH's research partners: the elite institutions who buckled so quickly in the face of Trump's antisemitism/DEI witch-hunts. These universities now face the same crisis as the DOGE-gutted civil service, with their best and brightest gone, grad students chased back to their home countries, and the trust of their students and faculty permanently squandered.

It's not just grad students who got chased out of America. Immigrants – documented and undocumented alike – have been terrorized for two years and many of them have fled. ICE got what it wanted: they robbed aging, stagnant America of the dynamism, aspiration and youthful vigor of the most ambitious people from every corner of the globe, people who proved their resourcefulness and bravery by making dangerous crossings. Then they navigated the US immigration system's impenetrable bureaucracy, often working without legal representation, in a language they were just learning, and still managing to clear every bureaucratic hurdle. This alone is a breathtaking demonstration of intelligence, resourcefulness and diligence. Those brilliant, hardworking people aren't coming back: some other country will get the benefit of their life's work and care. Their children will become citizens of other nations.

Now think of the hundreds of billions of dollars that have been transferred from ordinary working people who are still here, to America's oligarchs. Trump's tax cuts, corrupt policy subsidies and no-bid pork contracts have supercharged the wealth (and thus the power) of America's most corrupt elite. It will be the work of a generation to tax away their stolen loot, and much of it may never be recovered. These people will spend that time working to transform their wealth into permanent power, buying and installing politicians at every level of office.

Trumpland is a coalition of wreckers of every kind. Think of how MAHA undermined the nation's herd immunity to a host of communicable diseases, many of which can result in permanent disability. Long after MAHA is forgotten even as a punchline, the people whose health they destroyed forever will still be struggling. After a century of painstaking work to corral measles and other killer diseases, MAHA immunocompromised America itself, in just two short years. Any attempt to bring back evidence-based preventative medicine must now overcome the deep mistrust of medical science that an army of supplement-peddling quacks has sunk deep into Americans' psyche.

Speaking of mistrust: Americans must now and forever live with the knowledge that tens of thousands of their neighbors joined ICE, an armed, masked kidnapping squad that occupied US cities, murdering US citizens and noncitizens alike in the streets with impunity. Even if we try and imprison every one of those war criminals, it will take years and will shatter families and communities.

ICE proved that America is awash in small arms, but it's a different story when it comes to significant warfighting materiel. Trump's Iranian disaster used up the largest part of Pax Americana's arsenal of missiles and anti-missile interceptors. Putin doesn't need to convince Trump to cut off Ukraine's access to America's long-range arsenal. Trump shot his wad, and re-arming America is the work of decades, and it will cost billions, and it will require access to things America no longer knows how to make. Worse: the places where they do know how to make those things are no longer America's allies.

Can they be America's allies again? Well, sure, but only in a limited, Carneyist, "minilateral" way, in which countries form temporary alliances to accomplish specific goals. Biden spoke of "friendshoring" production of key goods and services. Friendshoring implies a reliable form of friendship, the sort that is built on decades of trust and interdependence. Friendshoring only works if the friends you friendshore to can be relied upon to stay your friends. Do we really think that if Venezuela deposes the puppet regime Trump installed after kidnapping the country's leader that it will remain America's "friend?"

That's the problem with weaponized interdependence: it only works for so long as the country America is screwing remains dependent on America, and now every country in the world is moving heaven and earth to break their dependencies on America, its institutions and products:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/10/weaponized-interdependence/#the-other-swifties

As Nate Bethea says on this week's Trashfuture podcast, airports outside of the USA are now filled with large, splashy ads urging businesses to move their IT out of America's cloud and off of American apps:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/10/weaponized-interdependence/#the-other-swifties

After Microsoft obliged the Trump regime by taking away the online accounts of foreign officials who made Trump angry, will any other country ever voluntarily trust them with their industrial capacity, let alone their government?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2025/07/22/microsoft-cant-keep-eu-data-safe-from-us-authorities/

I'm not saying America is a write-off: I'm saying that it has been sabotaged down to the foundation slab and structural members by a psychotic cadre of skilled arsonists, who were abetted by mad bombers who drove themselves even crazier by racking up life-altering debts in rigged "prediction markets" that serve as a vehicle for bankrupting yourself by wishcasting away your life's savings by betting on every aspect of a Permanent Chud Reich, as corrupt officials make out like bandits by trading on insider information.

When America comes back (if America comes back), it will not be as the organizing platform for the world's finance, military, technology and commerce. In years or perhaps decades, America may find a new stable place in the international community. But in the meantime, it cannot be relied upon to serve as the world's hyperpower. Trump forever disqualified America from enjoying that privileged place – and just to be sure, he destroyed its capacity to even try.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Open wifi saves traveler from hotel dial-up gouging https://memex.craphound.com/2001/11/09/i-just-wanna-say-that/

#25yrsago Why Cryptosystems Fail https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/archive/rja14/wcf.html

#25yrsago Bruce Sterling on Pokemon https://web.archive.org/web/20050908070521/https://www.wired.com/news/audio/interviews/sterling_11.mp3

#20yrsago Fred von Lohmann’s talk at USC https://web.archive.org/web/20061110090032/https://centeronpublicdiplomacy.com/podcasts/061107_von_lohmann.mp3

#20yrsago Secret WIPO memo: rich countries to kill Broadcast Treaty, Development Agenda https://www.ip-watch.org/2006/11/07/developed-country-strategy-on-wipo-development-agenda-governance-revealed/?res=1024_ff&print=0

#20yrsago Canadian copyright czar forced to turn away industry bribes https://web.archive.org/web/20101018194506/http://www.michaelgeist.ca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1521&Itemid=125

#20yrsago Copyright explained through a wild west metaphor http://www.greglondon.com/bountyhunters/

#20yrsago Why Zune shouldn’t pay blood money to Universal https://cdm.link/universal-microsoft-screw-over-artists-set-absurd-and-dangerous-precedent-with-zune/#more-1719

#15yrsago New Fed warrantless GPS trackers discovered in the wild https://web.archive.org/web/20111110191030/https://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/11/gps-tracker-times-two/all/1

#15yrsago Occupy Atlanta encamps on lawn of house under foreclosure threat https://web.archive.org/web/20111109225513/https://thinkprogress.org/special/2011/11/08/363692/occupy-atlanta-encamps-in-neighborhood-to-save-police-officers-home-from-foreclosure/

#15yrsago Ben from Ben and Jerry’s serves ice-cream to Occupiers https://www.fastcompany.com/1678825/the-ice-cream-man-of-zuccotti-park-ben-cohen-on-his-work-with-occupy-wall-street

#15yrsago Identity theft marketplace sells mothers’ maiden names, dates of birth, etc https://krebsonsecurity.com/2011/11/how-much-is-your-identity-worth/

#15yrsago Policy-by-nudging unsupported by evidence, and undemocratic https://web.archive.org/web/20111112154542/https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228376.500-nudge-policies-are-another-name-for-coercion.html

#15yrsago Wired.com photo policy: all staff-produced photos will now be Creative Commons licensed https://web.archive.org/web/20111111051330/https://www.wired.com/rawfile/2011/11/creative-commons/?pid=1365&pageid=6275

#15yrsago “Piracy-stricken” Viacom CEO tops pay-raise charts https://www.techdirt.com/2011/11/07/viacom-decimated-piracy-its-ceo-got-biggest-raise-any-exec-anywhere/

#15yrsago Boyett’s Mortality Bridge: Rock n’ roll Dante meets Orpheus https://memex.craphound.com/2011/11/08/boyetts-mortality-bridge-rock-n-roll-dante-meets-orpheus/

#10yrsago FAA okays use of semi-autonomous drones for Disneyland and Disney World fireworks displays https://web.archive.org/web/20161110065859/http://thedisneyblog.com/2016/11/07/disney-drones/

#10yrsago Glenn Beck’s “decency” doesn’t extend to answering questions about why he was such an asshole https://wnyc.org/story/beck-changed-man

#10yrsago CBC threatens podcast app makers, argues that RSS readers violate copyright https://www.reddit.com/r/podcasts/comments/5bmzuj/cbc_are_blocking_podcast_apps/

#10yrsago Winter Denial of Service attack knocks out heating in Finnish homes https://web.archive.org/web/20161109214609/https://metropolitan.fi/entry/ddos-attack-halts-heating-in-finland-amidst-winter

#10yrsago Women are flocking to Susan B Anthony’s grave to cover it with “I Voted” stickers https://www.thecut.com/2016/11/susan-b-anthonys-grave-will-be-open-until-the-polls-close.html

#10yrsago Edward Snowden to Trump campaign: “old laptops” could vet 800,000 emails in “minutes-to-hours” https://web.archive.org/web/20161107235120/https://www.yahoo.com/news/edward-snowden-crushes-conspiracy-theory-053349259.html

#10yrsago My neighborhood realtor is determined to turn a buck on electoral eschatology https://memex.craphound.com/2016/11/08/my-neighborhood-realtor-is-determined-to-turn-a-buck-on-electoral-eschatology/

#10yrsago A history of Chinese science fiction, from 475 BC to Cixin Liu https://web.archive.org/web/20161105172922/http://mithilareview.com/wang_11_16/

#10yrsago How Audi cheated emissions tests: if (steering) then (pollute) https://www.jalopnik.com/america-figured-out-a-new-way-audi-cheated-on-emissions-1788630969/

#10yrsago Senate investigates Wells Fargo retaliations against whistleblowers https://web.archive.org/web/20161108210544/http://www.warren.senate.gov/files/documents/2016-11-03_Wells_Fargo_FINRA_Violations_Letter_Final.pdf

#10yrsago A madman has been given the keys to the surveillance state https://memex.craphound.com/2016/11/09/a-madman-has-been-given-the-keys-to-the-surveillance-state/

#5yrsago Stockholm's war on interoperability https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/09/skrota-skolplattformen/#privacy-without-monopoly

#5yrsago Right-Clicker-Mentality https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/08/tina-v-tapas/#spoilsports-r-us

#5yrsago Charlie Jane Anders' Victories Greater Than Death https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/08/tina-v-tapas/#the-chosen-ones

#5yrsago Imagining the end of capitalism https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/08/tina-v-tapas/#its-pronounced-tape-ass

#1yrago Facebook's fraud files https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/08/faecebook/#too-big-to-care

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 574 (7730 total).

  • "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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