The US Supreme Court, like Trump, goes beyond neoliberalism to nihilism

Reversing gun control, overturning Roe v Wade, and now curbing the Environmental Protection Authority’s capacity to curb carbon emissions from coal-fired plants: the United States Supreme Court has in rapid order made three key decisions creating an American dystopia — or a utopia if you’re a religious fundamentalist, a white supremacist or a fossil fuel executive.

It will only be the beginning of what could be decades of such decisions from a Supreme Court stacked by Donald Trump with right-wing and fundamentalist lawyers.

The ultimate goal of any state capture process, and where it intersects closely with the core tenets of applied neoliberalism, is not merely to control government to ensure it operates in your interests but, if possible, prevent it from ever operating in any other manner, regardless of whether your preferred politicians are in power. The side of politics you’ve invested in most will at some point lose power in a democracy, necessitating some investment in their opponents as well. But it’s better yet if you can hobble the system so that government, no matter who is in charge, can’t act against your interests.

(That’s the rationale for investor-state dispute settlement clauses in trade agreements, as well — which can act to generate compensation for policy changes that, no matter how much they’re motivated by the public interest, harm the bottom lines of corporations.)

Curbing the power of the EPA — which was created by none other than Richard Nixon — to restrict the emissions of fossil fuel companies is a perfect example of this stage beyond state capture: it’s a form of state annihilation.

The actions of Trump-appointed judges to deliver such a verdict don’t merely reflect that Trump, for all his posturing as a political outsider, was ultimately elected to do the will of US corporate elites, and gave them the gift that will keep on giving in the form of a stacked Supreme Court. It gets at something more fundamental to the Trump project.

Trump’s goal wasn’t really a reformed government, not even a purified one that would emerge from the drained DC swamp. His project was the destruction of government. Those who criticised his failure to make key appointments across his administration missed the point that the effective operation of his administration was of no moment to him. His purpose was to permanently incapacitate the US federal government from being able to do anything — to discredit it, to disempower it, to degrade it.

This went beyond traditional neoliberal hostility to government and corporations preferring deregulation. It went somewhere more nihilistic, to a hatred of the very concept of government. For many Trump supporters, government in the US is no longer anything to be viewed positively. Government, in their eyes, is obsessed with being “woke”, pursuing a liberal agenda, helping women, immigrants, atheists, people of colour, and a long list of hated minorities. Government no longer serves them — mainly white, working-class and middle-class men. They feel they have no stake in government, which should exist only to reinforce their economic and social supremacy, but which only seems now to exist to help the people who they feel have been undermining their economic and social supremacy for far too long.

That’s why the profound contradiction between the libertarian rhetoric of many right-wingers in the US and their hostility to abortion rights doesn’t trouble them. They oppose government because government no longer serves them but when it does serve them by curbing the rights of those they regard as their inferiors, they welcome it as preserving the natural — even divine — order of things, and laud those who help achieve that.

This nihilistic hostility predated Trump, who merely exploited it. It was there in the Tea Party movement: they hated government but they also had strong connections with the Birther movement, which saw a Black president as fundamentally illegitimate.

And it goes beyond economic anxiety to resentment about the undermining of white heterosexual male supremacy in a myriad of ways. The entire agenda of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News from its establishment in the 1990s has been to stoke that anxiety and resentment and channel it into political action — including ever more aggressive, anti-democratic and violent rhetoric. Should Trump vanish tomorrow, Fox News would continue to stoke and exploit that resentment, and simply transfer its favour to someone else who could effectively exploit it — someone perhaps more presentable, and smarter, than Donald Trump.

The nihilistic sense of white economic and social grievance, fueled by the most powerful media company in the world, won’t be going away any quicker than the far-right judges on the Supreme Court. This crisis has a long way to run.