Everything-Bagel Authoritarianism

If you want to dismantle a liberal, pluralist democracy, you need to be able to tell parts of your far-right coalition “no.”

ICE raid on a Hyundai plant in Ellabell, Georgia, Wikipedia

I am deeply worried that President Trump has brought about a collapse in the governing capacity of American political institutions. The post-1970s balance of power rested on a Congress interested in defending its powers, political parties not beholden to a single individual, and courts that were not fully polarized. Trump stepped into that vacuum of countervailing power and filled it with personalized executive rule, systematically dismantling agencies and weaponizing them under his control. What we took for granted about the state has fractured, and I haven’t seen anything close to finding an alternative.

But I am no longer worried that President Trump has created a durable political economy that realigns the electorate. At the beginning of the year I worried we were in a 1936 or a 1984 moment where, without the electoral blowout, Trump would execute an agenda that addresses the challenges of this stage of capitalist development while securing a new economic and political center of gravity.

That hasn’t happened. It now feels borderline absurd to say it could have happened after this past year. It’s not just the bad sentiment and polling numbers, or the weakening labor market. There’s no theory of the case for what they are doing and why they are doing it. The centerpieces of this administration, the tariffs and the deportations, are unpopular. The tariffs are politically radioactive. The justifications for the tariffs change month by month. President Trump has somehow been outmaneuvered by the Democrats into political ownership of rising health care costs in 2026. And that’s even before the trillion dollars in Medicaid cuts, which the smarter Republicans realize will fall disproportionately on the aspirational coalition they had hoped to assemble.

What Went Wrong?

Why is this? Trump’s own ego, grievance, and transactional corruption are no doubt part of it. Trump coins, Trump battleships, The Trump-Kennedy Center. Trump is building a new Mar-a-Lago on top of the White House’s East Wing while CEOs bring him personal gifts. It’s also been a mean and grim year, a parody of right-wing wokeness, under President Trump. Trump began his first presidency with the idea of “American carnage,” but the viciousness and vindictiveness the phrase invokes hasn’t fully materialized until now.

The administration’s staffing decisions reflect a generational and ideological shift, the groyperfication as John Ganz describes it, that prioritizes cultural grievance over policy development. Who cares about coming up with a GOP plan for health care anymore? DOGE letting a bunch of kids loose with AI, thinking they’d reboot the government and eliminate the deficit, turned out to be a failure except for the lulz along the way. But groyperfication goes further. Their vibes bubble has them believing their mission is to engage in a culture war whose outlines are confusing even to the most internet-brain-melted, far afield from the non-based, normie goals of trying to secure the coalition that elected Trump in 2024 on a permanent basis.

But beyond those, I think this is the inevitable result of a coalition that dreams to be several contradictory things at once: a libertarian’s dream of a hollowed-out state, a protectionist’s managed economy, a global hegemon unburdened by obligations, and a hardliner’s deportation police state. Politics is trying to manage these contradictory dreams at the same time, but in 2025 it seemed like it was trying to go in every direction at once.

The Hyundai-ICE raid is the example that stands out to me. In September 2025, ICE agents raided the Hyundai electric vehicle battery plant in Ellabell, Georgia, detaining 475 workers, mostly South Korean nationals, over allegations of visa fraud and unlawful employment. Here’s a clear conflict between two priorities. Some in MAGA want to reindustrialize America and build strategic regional allies to isolate China. Some want no immigrants at all and reject the idea that we should use visas to bolster our productivity and knowledge.

Instead of picking a path, the administration did both. They did the raid, humiliating those running the plant and the South Korean government, causing an international scandal. They then turned around and reversed course, with Trump saying he was “very much opposed” to the raid. It could have been handled more easily. If the administration wanted some action on the immigration front while keeping the factory running, they could have picked up the phone. Hyundai and South Korean officials would have answered. But they didn’t choose. They ended up trying to do both and did neither, causing major problems instead.

Everything Bagels

The inability to direct among different pulls of their coalitions calls to mind the writer Ezra Klein’s 2023 description of “everything-bagel liberalism,” where “sometimes [the government] tries to accomplish so much within a single project or policy that it ends up failing to accomplish anything at all.” This description didn’t particularly hit the intended target of the CHIPS semiconductor grants. There’s an excellent overview of the process of CHIPS by the people who executed it, a Substack called Factory Settings hosted by the Institute for Progress, and I’m very happy they are doing it. Knowing a bit second-hand about that process, it accurately reflects it, all the strengths and weaknesses. They are dishing the dirt.

The “everything-bagel” term was a contentious one inside liberal politics, because of the implied attack on high-road employment and the coalitional politics required to pass bills into laws. You can read rejoinders by Ben Beachy here and here. But I think the concept is very useful to abstract up a level from that: what are the higher-level conflicts within your coalition, and how do they get settled and prioritized?

Because “everything-bagel authoritarianism” does make sense to me. Let’s consider what some of the goals the MAGA Trump coalition wants to accomplish:

• Mass deportations beyond securing the border or targeting criminal offenders.

• Reindustrialize America as a matter of national security, innovation, and employment.

• A libertarian attack on the administrative state, to strip the government of any power to regulate, especially for Silicon Valley.

• Isolate China as a global rival, decoupling from Chinese supply chains.

• Stop peer nations from ‘free-riding’ on the United States, and have a more aggressive stance against traditional allies and the rules-based liberal international order.

These goals are in direct tension. One can, with leadership and smarts, navigate the tensions here. But nobody appears to be trying to do that.

One place we see this conflict is between the libertarian attack on the administrative agencies versus the interest in reindustrializing America. Attacks on and firings at agencies like the Department of Energy, Commerce, and the EPA come into direct conflict with ambitions around reshoring supply chains, accelerating domestic manufacturing, and outcompeting China in strategic sectors like batteries, semiconductors, and advanced materials.

Right out the door in March DOGE made major cuts of the staff responsible for the CHIPS implementation of semiconductors in the U.S. Commerce Department. Half of the Department of Energy’s Loan Program Office (LPO) took deferred retirement alongside employee caps being announced. As The American Prospect’s Ryan Cooper noted, there’s a dark irony to Elon Musk attacking LPO after he himself got an LPO loan for Tesla, one of its major success stories. Clean energy initiatives, which are where China is taking the global lead, are being eliminated, often in the middle of the process.

Beyond that, if we’re going to upskill the domestic labor force into manufacturing, who will do all the jobs those workers were previously doing? We were near full employment, so it is difficult to discuss moving some workers into fields unless we understand where they were coming from. There’s hand-waving assumptions that deportations will increase automation, or bring native-born workers out of the sidelines. I don’t see any reason to believe that, largely because the proponents aren’t offering grounded empirical arguments for them.

The other place is on the global stage, something I’ll say I follow the dynamics of less closely. But perhaps because I don’t, the dissonance of trying to use economic statecraft to both isolate China while also attacking peer countries stands out even more to me. If the goal is to actually try and build alliances to keep China’s exports in check, why spend the last year mocking Canada as a potential 51st state of the USA and threatening to purchase Greenland? You see this in the National Security Strategy (NSS), which shifted from China in the first term to the “civilizational erasure” of Europe in the second.

Consider India. As a result of Trump’s actions this year, India now faces the highest tariffs when exporting to the United States (50%) of anyone else in the world. This is higher than China (47%). Do we want companies to decamp from China to India or not? This has sent the Modi government to meet with China for the first time in seven years to try and normalize relations, directly against decades of U.S. foreign relations interest. I understand anti-India sentiment is normalized among the younger groyper staffer class, but what is even the goal here? And who is trying to navigate it?

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These goals are genuinely in conflict. You can’t simultaneously gut the Commerce Department while executing complex semiconductor policy, or deport workers while reshoring labor-intensive manufacturing, or isolate China while alienating Europe and India.

It can’t be said enough: if you want to dismantle a liberal, pluralist democracy by empowering a strongman who promises to purge corrupt elites, bypass a paralyzed legislature, and subjugate civil society and the business class to personal loyalty tests administered by the Executive, you need to be able to tell parts of your far-right coalition “no.” That is the core of the everything-bagel analysis. But they aren’t doing that. Which means the libs might have a chance?