A unified theory of Trump Derangement Syndrome

TDS is how the US professional-managerial class avoids looking in the mirror and facing its own failings.

A starting place for defining Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) is:

The last clause is a bit harsh. It would be better as “affects one’s ability to think intelligently about why people vote for Donald Trump”.

I have never found Donald Trump himself all that interesting: though he has shown remarkable persistence and resilience. I have found the patterns of support for him fascinating. Indeed, D. Trump’s manifold personal flaws make the support he has received more, not less, striking.

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Yet I have also found it to be a persistent pattern that people afflicted with TDS fail to grapple intelligently with why D. Trump has the pattern of support he does. I have come to realise that that the function of TDS is to avoid doing so.

If Donald Trump is so awful, there cannot be any good reason to vote for him, as it is an unforgivable act. If there is no good reason to vote for him, then folk do not have to consider—in any positive sense—why people voted for him.

A political realignment President

It has been clear since 2016 that Donald Trump is an electorally weak candidate. He underperformed the Republican House vote share in 2016 and 2020. Yes, he won a majority of the popular vote in 2024, but lots of successful Presidential candidates have done better.

2024 was nevertheless a solid win, with 50.0% of the popular vote. Contrary to the hyperbole, it was not a landslide win.

Yet, despite being an electorally weak candidate, Donald Trump has proved to be a political re-alignment candidate: as were Andrew Jackson (1828, 55.5% popular vote), Abraham Lincoln (1860, 39.7%), Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1932, 57.4%), and Ronald Reagan (1980, 50.7%).

What cemented those re-alignments were the follow-up Presidential elections: Andrew Jackson (1832, 54.2% popular vote), Abraham Lincoln (1864, 55.5%), Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1936, 60.8%), and Ronald Reagan (1984, 58.8%).

Donald Trump cannot run again. We will see what happens in 2028.

Nevertheless, he is clearly a re-alignment candidate (and President) because across successive Presidential elections (2016, 2020, 2024) he has taken the Republican Party back to where it started—as a protectionist Party sceptical of foreign interventions relying on working class votes.¹ The question then becomes why has Donald Trump, of all people, been able to achieve this realignment?

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Once you put the question in those terms—as we should—focusing on Donald Trump’s personal failings becomes way less interesting. Unless, of course, doing so is a mechanism for not asking and, even more importantly, not answering such questions.

Why would you get such a political realignment? Because the previous political dispensation was not working for working-class Americans.

The political dispensation not working for working-class Americans starts with the decoupling of productivity growth from wage growth. The de-coupling began in the early 1970s or late 1960s, so before the advent of the neoliberal political regime of 1979-2016. What the neoliberal policy regime failed to do was correct it.

[Replaces a deleted graph from the Economic Policy Institute. It turns out the Economic Policy Institute is presenting the data in the deleted graph in a very misleading way.]

There are various possible reasons for the decoupling of productivity growth from [the flattening of ] wage growth. One is migration—particularly of low skill workers—suppressing the Baumol effect. (The Baumol effect is the tendency of competition for labour to spread the benefits of productivity increases² in specific sectors across the labour market to occupations that have not had any increase in productivity.)

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Another is the explosion of global trade doing the same—so that productivity gains are distributed across the global labour market. Yet another possible reason is increased bureaucratic parasitism: the benefits of economic growth being bled off into various bureaucracies, whether as direct payment to the bureaucracies or by their activities suppressing, or otherwise dispersing, the returns to productivity otherwise available to labour. Possibly, something else shifted in the underlying economic technology—both social and physical.

None of these reasons is mutually exclusive and may apply to different degrees in different societies. Indeed, they may well be mutually supporting. Weakening the bargaining power—whether economic (within labour markets), social (within localities) or politically—of resident workers obviously makes it easier for better organised groups to advantage themselves.

The decoupling of flattening wage growth from productivity growth very much coincides with labour and social democratic Parties becoming increasingly less working class in their activist base, and internal culture, and far more dominated in both by the university-educated. Eventually, it led to the devaluing of vocational education—useful for the working class—in favour of more academic education, congenial to the middle class in general and the professional-managerial class in particular. The more we dwell in administered states, the more social outcomes will reflect what is congenial to administrators.

While, under the neoliberal policy regime, there was certainly a shift away from government ownership of the means of production, and some shifts away from regulation of prices and quantities in markets, there was not—despite whining to the contrary—a concomitant shift in the scale of the welfare state nor in the bureaucratisation of society. On the contrary, the bureaucratisation of society—whether government, non-profit or corporate—has continued to increase.

Theory suppressing feedback

Meanwhile, the decoupling flattening of wage growth from productivity growth has become an increased burden for resident working classes.

The most direct increased burden has been the combination of migration and land use (and other) regulation blocking use of land for housing, driving up rents and so immiserating significant sections of the working and middle class.

Why The Economy Isn't Working

Less obvious is migration breaking up locally-based social capital, reducing the ability of local communities to hold political representatives accountable and to coordinate for the benefit of said communities. Another is increased competition for various positional (and quasi-positional) goods, such as political access and public attention. There are also congestion issues, particularly if increased cultural diversity makes it harder to coordinate to provide infrastructure. That domestic holders of capital—including human capital—benefit far more from migration than do domestic providers of labour increases the ability of the former to push income flows in their favour.

A Nobel memorial laureate—Robert Fogel—explained in detail (in Without Consent or Contract) how mass migration, resulting from the development of steamships and railways, fractured the American Republic along its fault-line of slavery. Yet the economics profession has got its collective head stuck so far its Theory and class-interest rear, that it refuses to pay any attention.

This despite the fact we have further cases of mass migration fracturing societies along their fault-lines. The movement of Palestinians into Lebanon fractured that country along its ethno-religious fault-lines, leading to the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990), Palestinian migration having previously provoked a brief civil war in Jordan (1970-71). The Palestinians sided with Saddam Hussein when he invaded Kuwait, which led to the Kuwaitis expelling Palestinians after the War. (This record is why no Arab country will take Palestinian refugees.)

[I discuss Robert Fogel’s analysis in this post.]

We can observe mass migration fracturing the US, the UK and Western Europe (particularly France) along their metropolitan/provincial divides. We can observe Middle Eastern Muslim migrants making the fiscal problems of welfare states worse in Scandinavia and the Netherlands.

Still most economists remain clueless. One can only judge wilfully so—aided and abetted by TDS in the US and contemptuous dismissal of rising electoral support for national populists in Europe.

Attitudes to migration have been turned into a quasi-religious class marker: only stupid/ignorant/malicious/low-class folk complain about migration and migrants, because migration never fails, people fail migration.

Policy advice from academics or think tanks has a persistent tendency to purvey Theory without feedback. Hence we get economists analysing people as utility-maximising rational agents operating via dispersed information: until they do things the economists disagree with (like complain about migration or vote for Donald Trump), at which point such folk are blind, ignorant and stupid.

An observant friend has commented that the retreat from free markets:

… is the fault of free-trade boosters and their refusal to own [the disruptive effect of China and] is destroying support for free trade and free markets more widely. Free marketeers have also foolishly hitched their wagon to open borders ideology.

So if free markets go under as a policy approach, it is the fault of their academic and think-tank proponents.

I strongly suspect that cutting immigration to the bone and pushing asylum seeker boats out to sea will, over time, lessen hostility to free trade.

But free trade must be decoupled from free movement or it will be gone as part of a job lot in policy terms.

One suspects, however, that the professional-managerial class—particularly its academic sub-group—is generally too arrogant, too wrapped up in Theory, the purveying of which provides them with status, to be told, or to learn. The triumph of Theory over feedback is, of course, a major reason for the institutions the professional-managerial class dominate becoming increasingly dysfunctional.

A parasitic managerial-professional class

Dysfunctional migration policy gives working class voters reasons to reject the neoliberal policy regime. How much of the activity of the managerial-professional class is just straightforwardly parasitic gives them even more reason to vote against existing dispensations.

A deep problem is the perverse incentives within the welfare-state apparatus. The welfare-state apparatus is not merely government bureaucracies. It extends to the advocacy economy and other non-profits. It extends to elements of corporate bureaucracies—particularly HR departments.

Much of the welfare-state apparatus profits off social dysfunction. Thus, the worse our collective metabolic health becomes, the more money is spent via public health and the more salient health policy becomes. Importing migrants who are a net drain on the fisc also increases the funds going through the apparatus of the welfare state. And so on. This is—how can we put this?—not a sound incentive structure.

People have noticed how mad so many of the “woke” policies and claims seem to be. So much of what goes on in public policy and pubic discourse seems to fall within George Orwell’s dictum (from Notes on Nationalism) that:

One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.

Or Bertrand Russell’s observation (form the Chapter ‘Language’ in My Philosophical Development) that:

This is one of those views which are so absurd that only very learned men could possibly adopt them.

Yes, a lot of it has a deep internal consistency, but only if you accept claims about reality that we either have no good reason—in logic and evidence—to believe, or good reasons not to believe it.

What is more important, is that such claims are very functional as a set of social strategies for operating inside highly bureaucratised societies. Acceptances of such claims signals “soundness”, allowing networks of the like-minded to coordinate. The grandiose moral claims motivate. They also both justify and provide social leverage—including by shaming and shunning people (aka cancel culture). They enable institutions to be colonised while also justifying increasing the social ambit of the colonised institutions.

What they represent is not merely the social imperialism, but the increased social parasitism, of the activist professional-managerial class. For Critical Constructivism (“wokery”) is all parasitic, dysfunctional nonsense. It is all a destructive waste of resources even as it has been a successful set of social strategies.

Trapped by Philosophy's worst features

I have previously referred to social alchemy theory—the notion that increasing social dysfunction will allow the liberated and transformed society to emerge from the ashes, like gold from lead. Social alchemy theory makes perfect sense as a social strategy within welfare state apparatuses that get more funds flowing through them the more dysfunctional a society becomes.

The belief that they own morality—which, strangely always leads to social arrangements that advantage people like them—is a key element of the activist professional-managerial class gaining social leverage through controlling social legitimacy.

You think you know who are woman is? Who can go into women’s bathrooms? Compete in women’s supports? No, you ridiculous pleb, you must defer to our expertise about gendered psyches, our control of moral legitimacy, enforced by shaming and shunning dissenters.

You think you know what racism is? No, you ridiculous pleb, you must defer to our expertise about hidden racism, built into the structure of society, deferral to which expertise is enforced by small-scale struggle sessions (aka DEI training) where you confront your inner racist.

And so on.

Trump is a standing affront to all that—to the activist professional-managerial class expanding social parasitism through their social imperialism justified by their owning morality—in his refusal to defer to their language, his flagrant disregard of their moral taboos.

By refusing to accept their framings, Trump comes across as direct, when so many centre-right politicians come across as mealy-mouthed. Pierre Poilievre in Canada has absorbed that lesson. The UK Tories (disastrously) did not.

The Trump campaign ad that Kamala is for they/them, Donald Trump is for you was bang on target. It is revealing of the underlying class dynamics that Trump won twice against pant-suited professional women who epitomised what working class folk (particularly working class men) find irritating about their professional-managerial overlords.

All this without considering the persistent loss of residents from particular “Blue” States—which “Red” States have been disproportionate beneficiaries of—or the strength of the swing in large metropolitan counties to Trump, both of which (at least in part) represent issues with progressive governance. Nor does it consider the normal patterns of bureaucratic decay.

The US national-security state lost in Afghanistan against the Taliban by repeating exactly the same dysfunctional bureaucratic patterns that led to its loss in Vietnam. There had been no operational learning, no learning embedded in the institutions, that led to the US national-security state to perform any better. It did, however, perform much more expensively per soldier deployed.

The way institutions have deteriorated in the hands of the activist professional-managerial class—so more and more institutions just don’t work as well as they used to—is another reason for members of that class to not consider their own performance. Especially when their mastery of Theory is often sound and fury reflecting way less than they claim. (Really, read the essay: it is both infuriating and reflective of over-claimed expertise.)

The Anti-Autism Manifesto

All of this is why we get a doubling down on the moralised discourse that is not reliably connected to reality—as Chris Bray so relentlessly documents and mocks—but is very reliably connected to the professional-managerial class’s own claims of moral legitimacy and superior understanding. Going on and on about the evils of Trump becomes very functional for clinging to their status as masters of Theory. Especially when they can discount all complaints and concerns that are not expressed with the correct delicacy of language, with the correct mastery of Theory—so all working class concerns, straight off.

Democrats Who Want to 'Listen' Now

What it does not do, is it does not help understanding what happened or why, because that would require looking in the mirror.

A decaying policy regime

The neoliberal policy regime is falling apart because it has failed to grapple with why things have been getting worse for resident working classes.

One is struck how much the appointments and policy announcements of the new Trump Administration are aimed squarely at the parasitic social imperialism of activist bureaucracies—up to and including public health parasitising off the the metabolic ill-health of the population.

In the 2024 US Presidential election, polarisation by class defeated polarisation by identity group. For polarisation by identity group represents the increasingly dysfunctional—indeed, deranged—parasitic, favour-divide-and-dominate social imperialism of the professional-managerial class.

A Graveyard of Bad Election Narratives

Polarisation by class represented the working class asserting its electoral power and economic interests. The US working class used Donald Trump as its weapon to do so.

To admit that migration can be done badly, that it can be destructive, that it can be socially and politically fracturing, would require the professional-managerial class to face its own screw-ups.

To admit the increased social-parasitism of the socially-imperial professional-managerial class would also require looking in the mirror, but with much grimmer implications.

TDS represents the professional-managerial class refusing to get the message, to instead take refuge in the stupidity of arrogance. Then again, elites displaying the stupidity of arrogance has been a hardy perennial across history. The wailing, and the febrile sneering, are manifestations of a wounded arrogance.

Rather than looking in the mirror, they can remain fixated on how awful Donald Trump is and—by extension—how awful everyone who voted for him is. Hence, nothing to see here.

Certainly, never to see themselves. Above all, never to see themselves.

References

George Borjas, ‘Immigration and the American Worker: A Review of the Academic Literature,’ Center for Immigration Studies, April 2013. https://cis.org/Report/Immigration-and-American-Worker

Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin, National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy, Pelican, 2018.

Robert William Fogel, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery, W.W.Norton, [1989] 1994.

Herbert Gintis, Carel van Schaik, and Christopher Boehm, ‘Zoon Politikon: The Evolutionary Origins of Human Political Systems’, Current Anthropology, Volume 56, Number 3, June 2015, 327-353. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29581024/

David Goodhart, The Road to Somewhere: The New Tribes Shaping British Politics, Penguin, 2017.

Mark Granovetter, ‘The Strength of Weak Ties: A Network Theory Revisited,’ Sociological Theory, Vol.1, 1983, 201-233. https://www.csc2.ncsu.edu/faculty/mpsingh/local/Social/f15/wrap/readings/Granovetter-revisited.pdf

Garett Jones, The Culture Transplant: How Migrants Make the Economies They Move To a Lot Like the Ones They Left, Stanford University Press, 2023.

Robert W. Komer, Bureaucracy Does Its Thing: Institutional Constraints on U.S.-GVN Performance in Vietnam, R-967-ARPA, RAND, August 1972. https://www.rand.org/pubs/reports/R967.html

Ann Krispenz, Alex Bertrams, ‘Understanding left-wing authoritarianism: Relations to the dark personality traits, altruism, and social justice commitment,’ Current Psychology, 20 March 2023. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4204827

Andrew M. Lobaczewski, Political Ponerology: A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes, Red Pill Press, [2006] 2012.

Stephanie Muravchik, Jon A. Shields, Trump’s Democrats, Brookings Institution Press, 2020.

Tommaso Nannicini, Andrea Stella, Guido Tabellini, and Ugo Troiano, ‘Social Capital and Political Accountability,’ American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, 2013, 5 (2): 222–50. https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/pol.5.2.222

M. O'Hearn, B.N. Lauren, J.B. Wong, D.D. Kim, & D. Mozaffarian, ‘Trends and Disparities in Cardiometabolic Health Among U.S. Adults, 1999-2018,’ Journal of the American College of Cardiology, (2022), 80(2), 138–151. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10475326/

Harold Robertson, ‘Complex Systems Won’t Survive the Competence Crisis,’ Palladium: Governance Futurism, June 1, 2023. https://www.palladiummag.com/2023/06/01/complex-systems-wont-survive-the-competence-crisis/

Max Rollwage, Raymond J. Dolan, and Stephen M. Fleming, ‘Metacognitive Failure as a Feature of Those Holding Radical Beliefs,’ Current Biology, 28, 4014–4021, December 17, 2018. https://europepmc.org/backend/ptpmcrender.fcgi?accid=PMC6303190&blobtype=pdf

Will Storr, The Status Game: On Social Position And How We Use It, HarperCollins, 2022.

Daniel Williams, ‘The marketplace of rationalizations,’ Economics & Philosophy (2022), 1–25. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/358989232_The_marketplace_of_rationalizations

1. This makes The Lincoln Project ironic at so many levels.

2. It turns out that the Economic Policy Institute presents this data in a very misleading way.