Contemporary Trumpism is not the conservative attempt to return US society back to the 1950s. It is the attempt to return US society back to the 1850s – an attempt which will fail completely, disastrously and totally.

By Dionysius

Between 2016 and 2026, the political system of the United States has been dominated by Trumpism, a.k.a. the US variant of billionaire fascism or plutofascism. Its domination was so complete that even when non-Trumpist politicians won elections, they did not question Trumpism’s single most compelling argument. This argument, in a nutshell, was that the United States could solve the 21st century problems of a collapsing middle class and an economy being looted by billionaire monopolists by a magical return to 19th century tariff walls, territorial imperialism and settler colonialism.

The year 2026 marks the moment when a majority of US citizens have stopped believing in 19th century magic. One of the most telling signs of this shift occurred on October 9, 2026, when Pete Hegseth, the Trumpist official in charge of the US military, announced that the US would broadcast the execution of a former US soldier on live television.

Hegseth had fully expected the announcement would create a wave of hurrah-patriotism. After all, the soldier in question, a former US Army major, had shot and killed 13 fellow soldiers and wounded 30 others at a military base in Fort Hood, Texas in 2009. The soldier also happened to be Muslim and the US-born son of Palestinian American immigrants, two groups which have been constantly scapegoated and persecuted by Trumpism.

Instead, the announcement triggered a firestorm of condemnation. Numerous former soldiers and Pentagon officials criticized the announcement as tantamount to a lynching, while human rights advocates pointed out that the only two countries which hold public executions are Taliban-ruled Afghanistan and theocrat-ruled Iran. Ten days later, overwhelming political pressure forced the Trump administration to back down and call off the broadcast.

To understand why Hegseth misread the situation so badly and why this moment is so significant, it is worth pausing for a moment to reflect on the group which forms the electoral core of Trumpism. This group consists of white males who are nostalgic for the settler colonial white masculinity which dominated US politics for almost two hundred years, i.e. between the creation of the US in 1783 and the civil rights and feminist struggles of the 1960s and early 1970s.

To understand why this group wants to return to the past, we must first understand that this white masculinity was responsible for 105 years of settler colonial land theft and genocide against the First Nations of North America. This period began with the 1785-1795 Northwest Indian War, and ended in the Wounded Knee Massacre in South Dakota committed by US soldiers against the Lakota people on December 29, 1890. Most of the surviving First Nations were confined to reservations thereafter, and none enjoyed full US citizenship rights until the Snyder Act of 1924.

This white masculinity was also crucial to perpetrating the horrors of 82 years of US chattel slavery (1783-1865) on African Americans and citizens kidnapped from Africa by slave traders. After the abolition of slavery in 1865, this white masculinity engineered systems of legal apartheid (commonly called “Jim Crow” laws) which privileged whites at the expense of African Americans. In addition to these laws, many US states had groups of white terrorists who regularly assaulted and murdered African Americans. The most notorious of these terrorists were the Klu Klux Klan, an organization so powerful that as late as August 12, 1925, an estimated 30,000 of their members marched openly through the US capital of Washington, DC without any legal repercussions whatsoever.

Official Jim Crow and unofficial racial terror ruled large parts of the US for 87 years (i.e. 1878-1965). They did not disappear until the 1965 Voting Rights Act granted African Americans the right to vote in all US states, and until Federal law enforcement agencies cracked down on white terrorist groups during the 1960s and 1970s.

Settler colonial white masculinity was equally predatory towards women, albeit with the proviso that property-owning white females were occasionally more privileged than African American males (conversely, African American females faced the double burden of racial as well as gender oppression). For almost two hundred years, US women were treated officially and unofficially as second-class citizens. Females had only limited rights to employment, education and property as compared to males, while wives were treated as dependents of their husbands.

US women did not achieve the right to vote on a national level until 1920, although it is true many US towns, cities and states had adopted female suffrage during the second half of the 19th century. It was not until the 1964 Civil Rights Act that discrimination based on gender was prohibited. It was not until the 1974 Equal Credit Opportunity Act that US banks were prohibited from requiring women who opened a checking or savings account to have a male co-signer. It was not until the 1980s that females entered the US workforce on a more or less equal basis with males.

To summarize a long and complex history, for nearly two hundred years large numbers of US white males could mercilessly exploit African American slaves who they owned as property African American sharecroppers who were their debt peons, and domestic partners who were essentially permanent indentured laborers. US white males also enjoyed a massive structural advantage in the job market vis-a-vis African Americans and females, who were subject to a variety of official and unofficial forms of exclusion.

Contemporary Trumpism is thus not the conservative attempt to return US society back to the 1950s. It is the attempt to return US society back to the 1850s – an attempt which will fail completely, disastrously and totally.

Hegseth is the perfect embodiment of this failure. Prior to becoming the head of the US military, he was a Fox News talk show host. He had no real training in military affairs and never displayed the slightest administrative capacity to run a vast organization which oversees 2.11 million soldiers. His sole qualification for the job was that he was a white male television entertainer who created heavily scripted performances designed to sell the ideology of settler colonial white masculinity to an audience of other white males.

Once installed in the Pentagon, Hegseth fired anyone with a degree of military competence and promoted incompetent sycophants. These latter view the military as a mere stepping stone on the path to becoming a highly-paid private consultant for the world’s most monopolized and wasteful military-industrial complex. In fact, Hegseth went so far as to impose mandatory testosterone testing of male US soldiers, on the wholly unscientific and frankly bonkers notion that high testosterone equals battlefield effectiveness (spoiler alert: it does not). In the words of a recent CBS news report: “The Trump administration has pushed out top female and Black officers, and Black and female officers have been disproportionately removed from promotion lists, a source familiar with the lists told CBS News. There are currently no active four-star women generals or admirals in the military. Many of those who failed to secure promotions have left the military.”

After gutting the US officer corps, Hegseth’s next achievement was to lose a war to Iran, a country without a modern navy or air force. The US spent a colossal $45 billion, lost most of its most advanced anti-missile interceptors, and had 81 of its aircraft shot down – for zero political results. Instead of collapsing, Iran’s theocratic regime was bolstered by an upsurge of patriotism, as ordinary citizens rallied against an unprovoked war against their country. Meanwhile, the wartime disruption of the strait of Hormuz increased the world price of oil from $65 on February 25, 2026 to $101 on October 20, 2026, triggering ruinous inflation in the world economy.

Thanks to these multiple catastrophes, Trumpism has become massively unpopular. Two out of three US citizens reject the war on Iran, while two out of three US citizens reject the Trump presidency as a whole. Interestingly, this rejection mirrors that of public opinion outside of the US, where two out of three people polled in thirty-six countries view the Trump presidency negatively.

What will follow next is the political bankruptcy of settler white colonial masculinity, in the form of the crushing defeat of Trumpism in the 2026 midterm elections and the first possibility of progressive political reform in the US since the brief window of 2020-2022. Needless to say, any successful reform coalition must attack the exclusionary vision of this white masculinity through an inclusionary vision of the US as a truly representative democracy, one capable of bringing concrete improvements to the lives of every single one of its thousands of communities and all 350 million of its citizens.

The author is a social activist in U.S.