The Trump administration is frequently operating outside the logic of capitalist self-interest, powered by an appetite for cruelty and destruction for the sake of cruelty and destruction and an all-consuming resentment.

Donald Trump was still just a landlord and TV bully when Steve Bannon, later to become the president’s on-and-off-again demagogue in chief, announced himself a pitiless enemy of the administrative state. Self-dramatizing as he is, Bannon’s words carried an undeniable frisson: “I am a Leninist and Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that is my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down and destroy all of today’s establishment.”

Insurgents and revolutionaries across the political spectrum have sought, in different ways and for different reasons, to smash the stat

See Full Page