Catastrophic Populism

In the United States, the early twenty-first-century autocratic turn emerges from a system that was already structurally fragile. Long before any individual leader came to dominate the political field, democratic legitimacy had thinned, institutional trust had decayed, and communicative coherence had been weakened by inequality, media saturation, and sustained disinvestment in public understanding. Into this brittle context enters a renewed fascist posture: contempt for constraint, instrumentalised hostility toward minorities, erosion of law, and the deliberate corrosion of shared reality, with Donald Trump functioning less as an originator than as an accelerant. A decisive portion of his electoral base arose from populations educationally thinned over decades, not by accident but through the quiet toleration of cognitive fragility as a manageable condition. Whether this was planned or merely left to accumulate is secondary to the result: a large, readily mobilised constituency primed for blunt narratives and symbolic enemies.

That mobilisation did not initially threaten the older regime of elite extraction. For decades, discreet billionaire capture and regulatory abuse relied on opacity, complexity, and background legitimacy to persist without disruption. What destabilised that arrangement was not resistance from below but exposure from within. Trump, borne in on the same tide of money and cynicism, made the underlying machinery loud, vulgar, and visible, collapsing the distance between private predation and public spectacle. Institutional and cultural resistance remains real, which is why the transformation is incomplete, but the damage was already embedded before it became theatrical. The system did not fracture because norms were violated; it fractured because violations were no longer hidden. The result is an accelerating shitshow that now threatens even those who assumed the structure itself was immune.

What follows is not best understood as collective stupidity or individual evil, but as catastrophic populism produced by overload. When communicative and social complexity exceed a society’s capacity to absorb them, pressure builds toward simplification, not as solution but as reflex. Difference collapses into singular leaders, binary myths, and emotionally efficient explanations that reduce interpretive demand. In a fragile system, this does not stabilise the whole; it strips away redundancy, slack, and tolerance, increasing volatility while giving the sensation of control. Opposition, critique, satire, and opportunism do not stand outside this motion; they circulate within it, feeding the same turbulent configuration. This is why the moment feels simultaneously vast and stupid, historically familiar yet improvised, and why its instability now expresses itself as delay, legitimacy loss, and cascading institutional fatigue.